how to improve your Lojban
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Ways to improve your Lojban.
- Start your own Lojban language blog. Writing can be a great way of properly learning the kind of vocabulary you need to describe your own life and interests, and of thinking about how to stop making grammar mistakes. The problem most people have is that they don't know what to write about. One traditional way to make sure you write every day in Lojban is to write a Lojban diary (journal), and a more up to date way of doing this is to write a blog. Popular topics include your language learning experience, your experience in studying various subjects, your local area, your language, or translations of different short stories.
- Write a news diary. Another daily writing task that can work for people who would be bored by writing about their own routines in a diary is to write about the news that you read and listen to everyday. If you include your predictions for how you think the story will develop (e.g. "I think Hillary will become president"), this can give you a good reason to read old entries another time, at which time you can also correct and mistakes you have made and generally improve what you have written.
- Keep a diary in Lojban. This is a popular method of making sure you use Lojban everyday for people who don't often speak Lojban and can't think of things to write about. The fact that you are writing about real things that have happened to you means that any words you look up in the dictionary will be vocabulary that is useful for you and easy to learn.
- Listen to others speaking and singing. There are now several Lojban videos on Youtube with Lojbanists speaking Lojban or singing. Also there are recording of different texts translated to Lojban (i.e. audio books) that you can download. Listening to music while doing something else can help a little for things like getting used to the natural rhythm and tone of Lojban speech, although the more time and attention you give to a song the more you will learn from listening to it again in the future.
- Read the lyrics to a song. Although just listening to a song in Lojban can be a good way of really learning the words of the chorus in an easily memorable way, if you want to really get something out of listening to Lojban music you will need to take some time to read the lyrics of the song with a dictionary. Lyrics are either attached to a video on Youtube or can be downloaded from mw.lojban.org. Once you have read and understood the lyrics, if you then listen and read at the same time, this can be a good way of understanding how sounds change in fast, natural, informal speech.
- Sing karaoke in Lojban. The next stage after understanding and memorizing a song is obviously to sing it. Although some words have their pronunciation changed completely to fit in with a song, most of the words have the same sounds and stressed syllables as in normal speech. Remembering which words rhyme at the end of each line can also be a good way of starting to learn Lojban pronunciation.
- Have a Lojban audio on in the background while you are doing your housework. Even if you are not listening carefully, it will help you get a feel for natural Lojban rhythm and intonation.
- Write a film, music, hotel or book review. Another motivating and easy way to make yourself write in Lojban is to write a review for a site such as Amazon or Internet Movie Database. Many non-native speakers write reviews on sites like this, and if you have some special understanding of the book, music or film due to your first language or knowing the artist personally, that would be very interesting for the Lojban speakers who read and write reviews on the site.
- Write down new words and expressions you've heard to your diary. This is quite similar to how babies learn, by listening, watching and copying. It is also good for your health!
- Learn and use the spelling system. Although there are not so many sounds in Lojban, it's important to correctly pronounce each sound. Practice by listening carefully of how fluent speakers pronounce letters.
- Search in Lojban corpus. Search in the tatoeba.org and corpus.lojban.org for different words or phrases in Lojban.
- Change the interface to Lojban. Switching this website's interface to the Lojban language can be a good way of submerging into the Lojban world. You can the interface of Wikipedia to Lojban as well.
- Read short stories, books or comics in Lojban. Read "Alice in Wonderland" or "The wizard of Oz" in Lojban. For some people reading such long books can be a great motivator to improve their Lojban. To make this easier for you and make sure that it motivates you rather than just making your tired, try first reading its translation to your language. This not only makes it easier to understand and guess vocabulary, but you are also more likely to remember the language in it. If you have not read the book before, reading a plot summary from the internet can also help in the same way. Even if you haven't read the book in your own language, you will find the Lojban is written in a slightly simplified way that is more similar to how your own language is written than a book originally written in Lojban would be.
- Read original Lojban stories. Stories written originally in Lojban might be for more advanced students as they can use expressions not translated to your native language word-by-word.
- Skip the first ten pages. If you have given up with a book in Lojban or are reading it very slowly, try skimming through the first ten pages or skipping them completely. The start of most books tend to be mainly description and are therefore full of difficult vocabulary and don't have a clear story line yet to help you understand what is happening and to motivate you to turn the next page. If the book is still too difficult even after the introductory part is finished, it is probably time to give that book up for now and try it again after you have read some easier things.
- Read dialogues. Opening up books before you buy one and flicking through them to find one with lots of direct dialogue in it has several advantages. If there is less text on the page due to all the speech marks etc, this can make it easier to read and easier to write translations on. Dialogue is also much easier to understand than descriptive parts of a book, and is much more like the language you will want to learn in order to be able to speak Lojban.
- Take a one week intensive course. Although you cannot expect to come out of a very short course speaking much better Lojban than when you started it, if you continue studying a little over the following weeks and months, the knowledge you gained then will gradually come out and mean that your level of speaking, listening etc. are better than they would have been if you hadn't taken that course. This positive effect can still be true up to a year later.
- Follow your intensive course up with an extensive course. The more time you can spend studying Lojban the better, but studying periodic intensive courses with a few hours of study a week in between is probably better value for money than any other system as it gives your brain time to subconsciously learn and start using the new language you have learnt before you introduce the next new "chunk" of language.
- Use IRC Chat. The web chat allows you to ask questions about Lojban and to practice it. Note that due to different time zones of Lojbanists around the world you might not get an answer immediately. The advantage is that while chatting in Lojban you have to think and respond quickly, and the language is short and informal just like speech.
- Supplement your group class with a one to one class. Another good way to combine two different kinds of classes is to study both in a group class with a Lojban teacher and one to one. Having a one to one teacher, even if just a couple of times a month, will mean that you can be taught exactly the language that you need, that you will have more time to speak, and that you can have as much error correction as you like. You can ask for a teacher in IRC chat or in Facebook group.
- Supplement your one to one class with a group class. The benefits of having a group class are often less clear to students, but they include the fact that you will learn to deal with several people speaking at once, have a chance to practice skills such as interrupting people, and will hear a range of different viewpoints and topics.
- Teach your children or friends some Lojban. Recent research has shown that elder children tend to be a couple of IQ points above their younger siblings, and the most likely reason is that explaining things to their little brothers and sisters gives them an intellectual boost. In the same way, teaching someone lower level than you the Lojban you already know is a great way of permanently fixing that knowledge in your own brain.
- Ask your company to start Lojban lessons. Even if you don't need to speak Lojban at work, Lojban lessons can be a fun and reasonably priced way for your company to spend their training budget in a popular way.
- Play Lojban-enabled games like Minecraft. Although such games can have quite random language and are unlikely to improve your ability to speak Lojban on their own, the next time you hear or read the same language elsewhere it will be really fixed in your brain by the fact you have played a game with it in already. It is also a nice way of taking a break from your other Lojban studies while also doing some Lojban. To make sure it really is a break and to avoid wasting time learning language from the game that is not much used in daily life, don't bother writing down any new language you see in the game, but just try to learn it from playing the game again.
- Say or think what you are doing in Lojban as you do your daily tasks. As you are doing your chores, try creating sentences describing what you are doing, e.g. ‘I am unscrewing the ketchup bottle cap'. This gets you used to thinking in Lojban without translating, and can be a good way of seeing what simple vocabulary that is around you everyday you don't know yet. Write down your sentences to your diary.
- Be realistic about your level. One thing that holds many language learners back is actually trying too hard and tackling something that their brain is not ready for yet. Checking your level with a level check test on the internet, by taking an Lojban language test, or by taking a free trial level check and/ or lesson in a language school will help you find out what your level is and so choose suitable self-study materials.
- Be realistic about your reading level. Most researchers agree that people learn most when reading something they understand almost all of. If there are one or two words per page that you have never seen before, that is about the right level. If there are three or more on every page, you should switch to something easier and come back later.
- Read graded readers (= easy readers). These are books that are especially written for language learners like you. The method is called "Learn inline" in Lojban community. Although it can be difficult to find something as interesting as things written in newspapers or on the internet, in terms of learning the language only people who need to read for their work or an exam usually gain more from reading things written for graded readers. Graded readers also have the benefit of giving you a lot of knowledge about the literature, and culture more generally, of different countries in a short time.
- Read the whole thing with no help. Although using a dictionary has been shown to help with both short term and long term learning of vocabulary, the fact that using it slows reading down can stop some people reading in Lojban at all. Reading a whole book quickly through just for pleasure from time to time will help you remember how fun reading in another language can be.
- Read and learn everything. At the opposite extreme, it can be hard work but very satisfying to get to the end of a book knowing that you have learnt every word in it. See other tips on this page to make sure it is a book that is easy enough to do this with and to ensure that the vocabulary you learn is useful.
- Keep a vocab list to learn. Even if you don't often find time to go though your vocab list and it keeps on building up, just the act of choosing which words you need to learn and writing them down on a special list can help you learn them.
- Go through your vocab list several times every day. If ticking off words on a vocabulary list on the train to work is inconvenient or embarrassing for you, you can keep your list of words to learn as an entry in your electronic dictionary, as a mobile phone to do list or as a text file in your MP3 player. Although the time spent transferring the information between different formats like these may seem wasted, in fact any time you spend using the vocabulary like this will help you learn it.
- Convert your vocab list to Lojban only. One way to stop yourself translating and therefore increase your speed of comprehension and production is to learn all your vocabulary without the use of your own first language. Ways you can write a vocab list in only Lojban include with synonyms (words with the same meaning, e.g. "tall" and "high"); with opposites ("high" and "low"); with pronunciation factors such as number of syllables (the number of beats, e.g. three for "fram-be-si") and the word stress (the syllable that is pronounced louder and longer, e.g. the second syllable in "framb`esi"); and gapped sentences (e.g. "I am not _________________ in science fiction" for the word "interested").
- Cross out and delete. Crossing out or deleting words, sentences or whole pages that you have learnt can be a great motivator, and save your list of things to learn becoming too big to handle.
- Throw everything away and start again. One of the things that can put most people off learning is a stack of half finished books or a huge list vocabulary waiting to be learnt. Simply getting rid of all that and starting again with something new from zero can be a great motivator and get your studies underway again.
- Label things in your house or office with post-its. The easiest vocabulary to learn is the vocabulary of things you see and use everyday. If you can write the names of things around you on slips of paper and stick them on the real thing, this is a great way of learning useful vocabulary. If you can leave them there over the following days and weeks, this is a very easy way of revising the vocabulary until it is properly learnt.
- Label a drawing. For people who can't put labels on real things, the next best option is to take a photo of a real place in your life like your office, print it out, and then draw lines to all of the things you can see in the picture and label them in Lojban with the help of a dictionary. You can do the same thing with places you pass through everyday like the station. Because you will see the same thing again and again, it should be easy to really learn the words for those things.
- Write fiction in Lojban, e.g. short stories. For people who find writing a diary about things that happen to them everyday boring, the best thing is to let your imagination go and write about whatever comes into your head. The advantage of this is that if you can't think of how to say something in Lojban, you can just change the story to something that is easier to explain. Perhaps the easiest way to start writing fiction in Lojban is with a diary, changing any details you like to make it more interesting and adding more and more fantasy as the weeks go on.
- Learn a story in Lojban by heart. Although you may never hear or get the chance to say exactly that line, having one memorable example of an Lojban grammatical form in your head can make it much easier to learn other examples of the same grammar as you hear them. It is also something you can practice over and over without being as boring as grammatical drills.
- Use a dictionary while you are watching a video/listening to music. Films often have the same words many times, so if you look up important words the first or second time you hear them, you should have learnt them by the end of the film. It is easier to use a dictionary if you watch with Lojban subtitles.
- Record your own voice. For people who don't have much or any correction of pronunciation from a teacher, recording yourself and listening back makes it easier to hear whether you are really making the Lojban sounds that you are trying to or not.
- Learn as many words as you can of one category, e.g. animal words. Learning similar words together can both expand your overall vocabulary and make them easier to learn by forming links between the words in your brain.
- Visit Lojban meetings as in person or via internet. This is a good motivator to study Lojban seriously before the meeting. If possible, also try to use Lojban even when you could use your own language.
- Draw pictures of the words you want to learn. Especially if you are artistic, this can be a better way of learning vocabulary than writing translations or example sentences.
- Find a boyfriend or girlfriend interested in Lojban. No tips on how to do this here, but everyone agrees that getting or even just looking for a date in Lojban can be a great motivator to improve your language skills.
- Arrange a conversation exchange. Swapping lessons and conversation with someone who wants to learn your language can be a good alternative for those who aren't looking for romance, or can sometimes lead onto dating for those who are!
- Sign up for an Lojban language exam. Even if you don't need to take an exam and don't want to or can't take a special course to study for it, paying to take an exam with a Lojban teacher can really motivate you take your Lojban studies seriously.
- Model your accent on one particular Lojbanist you talk to in audio chats. Students who say they want to sound more like a fluent speaker have the problem that native speakers don't sound all that much like each other. Choosing one model can make the task of improving your pronunciation more clear, and is quite fun. Doing an impression of that person also makes a good party trick.
- Write your own Lojban-Lojban dictionary. Trying to use a bilingual dictionary less and switching to a monolingual one can help you to stop translating in you head when you are speaking or listening, and other useful Lojban vocabulary can come up while you are using the dictionary.
- Occasionally talk to or e-mail your friends in Lojban. Many people find this a bit false or embarrassing, but if you think of it as a study club and set a particular time and/ or place, it is no different from studying maths together.
- Learn your electronic dictionary vocabulary list. Most electronic dictionaries also have a button which you can push to see the last 30 or more words you looked up. By deleting words you decide are useless or you have already learnt from this list, you can use it as a "to do list" of words to learn that you can look at several times a day in the train etc.
- Set goals. Deciding how many hours you want to study, how many words you want to learn or what score you want to get in a test are all good ways of making sure you do extra study.