Learning Lojban

author: michal wallace (of withoutane.com)

mi nelci lenu tadni le lojbo

Every once in a while, I decide to play around with the constructed language Lojban. Mostly I am interested in language learning (and teaching), and like Lojban because it's a small, self-consistent language. It also potentially has many applications with regards to machine translation and AI.

Lojban advocates claim it is possible to learn lojban far more quickly than natural languages, because the grammar and spelling are much more regular, and because of the heavy use of affixes. My interest is in flattening the learning curve even more by applying cutting edge language training techniques.

conversational lojban, lesson 1 is a web based lesson similar in feel to the popular Pimsleur tapesets. You will learn how to make some simple statements and ask simple questions, as well as introduce yourself.
LearnFast (1.3MB download) is a flashcard-style program written with pygame that steals ideas from Pimsleur and also from Superlearning.. It currently teaches 64 lojban gismu (content words similar to verbs, nouns, adverbs, and adjectives in English). The theory behind it is described in LEARNFAST.TXT. Each LearnFast session is meant to have two 15-minute parts - training and testing. Only the training part is currently implemented.
I once suggested creating an immersive adventure game called lojbo munje, but I no longer plan to actually build it.

There is more about learning lojban on the lojban.org learning page.