Lojbanic Phone Group

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  • Mumble: a vocal chatroom
  • Cinch is an audio-blogging service which allows its users to record directly to the website or phone in to record.

Robin Lee Powell's idea was that people should call each other at mutually convenient times for chats in Lojban.

The overall goal being to establish a broad level of conversational fluency in the lojban community.

The tools to be used are primarily Skype and direct browser-to-browser chats like appear.in.

Skype Phone Group Topics

  • You can arrange a voice call (phone or VoIP) with another Lojban speaker at any skill level.

A lot of people have expressed concern about the phone group with respect to the "well, what would we talk about?" issue. I'm pretty sure that discussions about that will take up a lot of space, so please see the Phone Group Topics page.

Nowadays, Story Time With Uncle Robin is a recurring topic.

How to start voice chats

There is the group in Google+ where you can videochat in real-time with other Lojbanists. Both classes for beginners and advanced learners are planned. Just check out for the last messages on hangouts (the term that denotes videoconversations in Google+).

You can also use http://appear.in for voice chats.

A list of members (seldom updated)

You can also use this list especially if you use Skype. However, it's better to find in IRC chat people willing to voice chat with you.

Name E-Mail Time Skype ID Expertise #lojban Nickname
Robin Lee Powell rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org PST rlpowell Expert rlpowell
Ark Balandin GMT + 4 ark.balandin Expert .ark.balandin.
Jordan DeLong fracture@allusion.net CST
Pierre Abbat phma@phma.hn.org EST Beginner
Theodore Reed rizen@surreality.us PST tedreed Intermediate bancus
Arnt Richard Johansen arj tu'i bu nvg denpa bu org CET Intermediate Broca
Steve Pomeroy steve@staticfree.info EST ? Beginner Xavier
xod xod ne'i balvi pi'e org EST Intermediate/Expert
greg epfl@lojban.org CET ? Beginner/Intermediate
Stephen Weeks tene@allalone.org MST srweeks Intermediate Tene
Philip Newton pne@writeme.com CEST ? Beginner
Matt Arnold matt.mattarn@gmail.com EST matt_arnold Beginner Eppcott
Adam Lopresto adam ne'i pubcrawler pi'e org CDT adamlopresto Beginner/Intermediate
Kevin Reid kpreid@mac.com EDT kpreid Intermediate kpreid
Yanis Batura ybatura@mail.ru GMT +6 soyendo Beginner Yanis
Alex Martini alexjm@umich.edu EST amartini51 Beginner/Intermediate aleks
Jonathan Strickland djanatyn@gmail.com EDT ? Beginner/Intermediate djanatyn
William McMillian MDT William McMillian Beginner Very_Bill
Remy Way rem.klajis@gmail.com EST rem.klajis Beginner/Intermediate remklajis
Gianmarco Molino mercrutio.undefined@gmail.com MDT mercrutio.11235813 Beginner mercrutio
Brett Williams selckiku@gmail.com EST selckiku Expert selckiku
Ashley P. ashley.akakuro@gmail.com EST kiriel.ambar Beginner eclen
? mikkommm@gmail.com GMT+2 mikkommm Beginner spfnym

Joining

We welcome anyone, regardless of expertise, physical location or monetary resources. If you can't speak much lojban, well, learning to understand others will help. If you can't afford to make long distance phone calls, one of the other members will be happy to call you. If that doesn't work, Robin Lee Powell'm willing to pony up calling card money just to get this going.

To join, just add people above to your skype friends' list and ask who might be available to talk with you.

In an ideal universe, Robin Lee Powell'd like to see people matched up with people of very different levels of ability, to spread the expertise around as quickly as possible, but I'm not hugely attached to that.

Lojban On The Phone

Please bear in mind, everyone, that collision avoidance is hard on the phone. Please become familiar with ta'a, re'i, be'e, je'e, ki'a and ke'o. Especially that last one.  :-)

Here's a phonetic alphabet for spelling words on the phone.

About Expertise

The "expertise" field in the members table is currently rather informal, and you are welcome to alter yours as you feel appropriate. However, Robin Lee Powell and Nick Nicholas have had their expertise certified in person. The reason behind such system is the option of making the phone group into a ranking system, similar to Chess rankings. In other words, if you want to be certified Expert level, you ask Robin or Nick to take some time to call you up and basically hammer away at you for an hour. You, in turn, can then certify people at rankings below Expert (or, possibly, at or below expert).

I doubt very much that it's necessary to say so, but please note that any use of word lists in any such tests would be cheating.

The infrastructure to do this is not in place, but I'd like people to keep it in mind as a future goal. Thanks to la tsali's accidental suggestion, allow me to suggest that we will probably charge for the certification, all proceeds to the LLG of course.

Expertise Rankings
  • Fluent: No concious thought required to speak in Lojban for any but the most complex conversations, and even then the mental work should not normally be about Lojbanic grammar or vocabulary. A good test for Fluency is whether you are able to engage in a complicated Lojban conversation whilst also doing something else, something that you could do at the same time as having a conversation in your native toungue.
  • Expert: Able to engage in conversation in lojban with only minor and occasional pauses for thought.
  • Intermediate: Comfortable with one of Lojban grammar or Lojban vocabulary, but not both.
  • Beginner: Requires word lists to converse, not comfortable with Lojban grammar.

Note that all expertise rankings mentioned on this page are with respect to spoken, conversational Lojban only. Note further that neither Nick or Robin Lee Powell consider ourselves Fluent. Everyone else seems to consider Nick fluent, though, so this may just be that we have high standards of the word Fluency. Since I started this group, though, I get to define the terms.