Ease of learning for different native languages

[Luke Bergen]

Someone asked me on twitter: "When learning a non-ambiguous language like Lojban, do Germans have an easier time than native English speakers?".

Not sure I've ever seen this discussed. Do we have any native German (or other languages) speakers present? How easy/hard was learning Lojban for you.

Any thoughts or impressions on how non-english languages aid/hinder learning lojban vis-a-vis it's lack of ambiguity?

Otherwise, the first thing that jumped out at me was the similarity to German with the lujvo system. 

[Gleki Arxokuna]

It all depends on textbooks. One can explain different features of Lojban in different order depending on the natlang in question.

E.g. I can see the need in explaining {co'i} earlier for Russian speakers than for English speakers so that the first ones find more familiar features sooner.

The same for free word order which in some ways is more limited in English and thus not that relevant.

May be a few more features but these two are most noticeable.

More distant languages might require reworking the order to a larger degree.

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[Alexander Kozhevnikov]

On Mon, 22 Sep 2014, Luke Bergen wrote:
> Do we have any native German (or other languages) speakers present? How
> easy/hard was learning Lojban for you.

Native Russian speaker here. But here's the thing:

I have not yet learned Lojban, I am just starting to seriously delve into
it after years of hovering over it thinking how nice it would be to learn
it.

ji'a Russian was my first/native language, but I've lived in America since
I was 7.5 or so, so I am vastly more proficient in English (but my English
proficiency has consistently been considered better than my peers since
around 5th/6th grade and my Russian proficiency, I'm also told, is better
than that of other natively-Russian kids with similar histories of
development. I attribute this to my parents being good at
nurturing/maintaining my mental development, but enough rambling). Point
is, my perspective is not representative of a native Russian speaker. I
think my perspective is more accurately seen as that of a
natively-bilingual Russian-English speaker.

Since I am only starting learning lojban, so I cannot yet answer this
portion of your question properly. First and foremost thought is that the
early-bilingual experience makes understanding meanings/nuances easier,
because meaning/thought and language is decoupled earlier and more
intuitively/deeply in your mind when your language development is like
that. But I'll do my best to remember to provide a follow-up once I
actually feel I've learned lojban to a minimally usable extent, and then
again once I feel I am truly fluent in it.

On Mon, 22 Sep 2014, Luke Bergen wrote:
> Any thoughts or impressions on how non-english languages aid/hinder
> learning lojban vis-a-vis it's lack of ambiguity?

Again, from the fluently-bilingual-since-childhood perspective, I think
specifically that bilingualness makes learning any language easier (see
prior paragraph), but lojban especially because lojban seems, from my
naive understanding of it, to be better able to efficiently convey nuance
and disambiguate/distinguish concepts, in large part "vis-a-vis it's lack
of ambiguitiy". Because I learned a second language as a kid, I think that
I am pretty good at figuring out meanings from context - being able to
convey the distinctions that one language can make that another language
cannot, however, is in my experience often problematic. I think (again
somewhat naively) that lojban will prove for me to be a major boon in that
department, but sadly I think that the biggest benefit it can have there
is with someone else who knows lojban. E.g. I can think of several
instances where I felt/thought wistfully: "if only I and this other person
could both fluently speak lojban, then I could explain to them the meaning
of this phrase from the other language much easier." (I think I have
enough "meta" knowledge about lojban to confidently think it can do that
even while not knowing enough of lojban to know how exactly it would.)

On Mon, 22 Sep 2014, Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
> E.g. I can see the need in explaining {co'i} earlier for Russian
> speakers than for English speakers so that the first ones find more
> familiar features sooner. The same for free word order which in some
> ways is more limited in English and thus not that relevant. May be a few
> more features but these two are most noticeable.

Maybe this is just because I am prone to thinking that more mental
difficulty is better, or some other wierd aspect of my cognition, but I am
inclined to think that for the most part, teaching people the familiar
stuff first will just make them complacently willing to remain
ignorant/deficient in the unfamiliar, and will have an adverse effect in
the long term for people picking up the whole language.

Regards,
mi'e .aleksandr.kojevnikov. mu'o

[Gleki Arxokuna]

It again depends on the textbook in question.

Sometimes it's easier to make people be able to construct sentences immediately.

However, in the case of Russian those two issues ({co'i} and free word order) are not that necessary since most simple sentences in Russian have the expected word order as in Lojban by default or as in English. As of {co'i} tenses and event contours are optional in Lojban and one can live without them for while speaking a simple style Lojban.

So Russian is not a good example since the differences from English are minimal.

Regards,
mi'e .aleksandr.kojevnikov. mu'o

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[Alexander Kozhevnikov]

I got some more thoughts thanks to my just written out reply to the
lojbanized-name-in-unix/linux thread:

Russian, I think, warps the mind a little with regards to pronounciation
(I suspect many natlangs do), in ways that are relevant:

1. Typical Russian speech turns the A and O sounds into the shwah
(spelling?) sound when the syllables it's in are not stressed. I think
this warps our notions of what those two letters/phonemes sound like when
unstressed.

2. We similarly say our equivalent to lobjan's "v" as lojban's "f" when
it's at the end of a word.

3. I remember being taught that each word has exactly one stressed
syllable. I think this notion had the most warping impact on me
personally, though I can't say if that's only because of me having
incidentally learned and thought about that one at the right moment in my
formative stages.

4. In Russian we have this notion that the letter combinations equivalent
to lojban's "ji" and "ci" are actually pronounced not with what lojban's
"i" maps to, but with this other vowel we have, (at least I'm pretty sure
it's a vowel), represented by the letter 'ы'. I am not feeling up to
digging up the IPA symbols for it and verifying for certain if it's one of
the acceptable ones for lojban's "i", but I'm fairly confident it isn't. I
still have to frequently catch myself when reading these combinations in
lojban.

I think lojban teaching material for Russians will need to account for all
of the above points early on, and by "account for" I mean explicitly bring
the reader's attention to, and then dismiss as not being unversal speech
"realities" (I think monolinguals with little to no foreign language
experience in particular are very good at deluding themselves into
thinking that the way their language implicitly substitutes certain
letters/symbols with non-correspondant phonemes is natural and possibly
even inate to all human speech), and instruct the reader that it
is definitely not correct in lojban.

[MorphemeAddict]

Re #2: Russian normally devoices final consonants (not just 'v') of words and before unvoiced consonants at morpheme boundaries, but since such consonants only occur finally in Lojban cmevla, I think it's a very minor problem. 

The Russian devoicing doesn't affect l, r, m, n, but this shouldn't affect perception of Lojban either. 

stevo

[Gleki Arxokuna]

a nice comment. i'll definitely pay attention to it when it comes to translating and adapting tutorials to russian. i completely overlooked alphabets and spellings in natlangs as a problem for lo nintadni, .u'u.

[Alexander Kozhevnikov]

On Sun, 28 Sep 2014, MorphemeAddict wrote:
> Re #2: Russian normally devoices final consonants (not just 'v') of words
> and before unvoiced consonants at morpheme boundaries, but
> since such consonants only occur finally in Lojban cmevla, I think it's a
> very minor problem. 
>
> The Russian devoicing doesn't affect l, r, m, n, but this shouldn't affect
> perception of Lojban either. 

ki'e Thanks for catching that. My biggest problem as someone who learned
Russian as a kid but then didn't have exposure to consistent Russian
schooling after the fact is that I am rarely consciously aware of these
details.

I also completely forgot when writing point two that indeed in lojban only
cmevla end in consonants, so in practice I think you're probably right and
that point would not have all that high of an impact.

mu'o mi'e .aleksandr.kojevnikov.