Can one be fluent in Lojban in the same way as other languages?

[Collin Damskov]

Is it possible to achieve the sort of fluency in Lojban that you can in other languages where you can sort of intuitively create grammatically correct and sensible sentences on the fly, or is the unnatural nature of Lojban something that blocks it from being learned in that way?

[Timothy Lawrence]

> is the unnatural nature of Lojban something that blocks it from being learned in that way?

I doubt it. For example, I am fairly fluent in the programming language C++, such that I create syntactically correct and sensible code on the fly, and I would say C++ is even more unnatural than Lojban.

I actually think it will be possible to learn Lojban even more correctly than natural languages, because software will be able to automatically and quickly point out mistakes, given the language is unambiguous. This computer-checking definitely speeds up the learning of programming languages. There are Lojban parsers, but I am not sure if there is yet anything quite at the same calibre of a static code analyser for programming languages.

---

From: lojban-b...@googlegroups.com <lojban-b...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Collin Damskov <collin....@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, 22 August 2016 9:08 AM
To: Lojban Beginners
Subject: [lojban-beginners] Can one be fluent in Lojban in the same way as other languages?

 

Is it possible to achieve the sort of fluency in Lojban that you can in other languages where you can sort of intuitively create grammatically correct and sensible sentences on the fly, or is the unnatural nature of Lojban something that blocks it from being learned in that way?

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[gryp...@gmail.com]

I tried posting this one without effect, so similar posts from me Matt show up.

It is certainly possible to became fluent in lojban as a limited number of people have done so. It would take less, I suspect, than is needed to learn a foreign language.

[gryp...@gmail.com]

Yes, it is possible to learn lojb@n fluently, as several people have already. It probably takes fewer total hours than it takes to learn a normal foreign language,actually.

[gryp...@gmail.com]

Yes, it's possible to speak lojban enough to do those things, as several people have done so already. It probably takes fewer total hours than learning a traditional language to such a degree.

[Pierre Abbat]

On Sunday, 9 September 2018 18.52.40 EDT gryp...@gmail.com wrote:
> It certainly is a very few people have achieved this. I suspect it takes
> less time put in with traditional languages, actually.

I think it is more difficult to be fluent in Lojban because the vocabulary is
not as large. One part of fluency, which is important in a language with a
small vocabulary, is making up words on the fly. My first two languages are
English and French; if I'm speaking Spanish and I don't know the word for
something, I can borrow a word from French, or coin one from Latin roots that
I know from English and French words, and have a high probability of being
understood or even getting the right word. If I'm talking Lojban with, say, a
Japanese, and I don't know the word for something, I could make up a lujvo,
which has some chance of being understood, or I could make up a fu'ivla, which
has very little chance of being understood, since the only language we have in
common is Lojban. The lack of vocabulary for some things means that more time
will be spent making up words for those things, resulting in less fluency.

Pierre
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