Being a newbie to Lojban, this image was actually helpful in understanding what la means specifically. Please don't let this effort die

I, as a newbie to Lojban, really liked this image. I could see this effort really helping me learn Lojban easier and simpler. Please don't let this effort die!

Sorry about the double post.

Thanks for the kind words. Hopefully I can go ahead and start on a beginner's guide. I'm thinking {xravelcli} "picture-ish learning-source" or {xractu} "picture-ish teacher" as names.

OK, here have I have a "work-in-progress" page:

http://jbotcan.org/xractu/xractu/xractu.html

>>1159

That's very good. I was going to say that "la'e" and "zo" were probably better left to lesson 87 rather than being introduced in the first lesson, but I see you are now starting with more simple stuff.

Many gismu are already defined/exemplified though pictures in http://jbo.wikipedia.org/wiki/pixra_liste_loi_gismu-b
You could use that as a "dictionary" and concentrate on the grammar, which of course will be the more difficult task.

You could have {remna <picture of a woman> ninmu} followed by {remna <picture of a man> nanmu}, to teach words for similar things and different things at the same time. You can also use this trick with the danlu pictures:
{danlu <picture of a man and a woman> remna}
{danlu <picture of a cat> mlatu}
{danlu <picture of a bird> cipni}
{danlu <picture of a man, a woman, a bird, and a cat>}

Pictures teaching the numbers 1 through 9 should be easy. Once you have those, you can start on images like >>1117

>>1152

la jbobauctuxra == "The Lojbanic-Language-Teaching Picture(s)"

Long, but precise. Actually, since beginners often have trouble recognizing rafsi, "la lojbo bangu ctuca pixra" might be best.

>>1161

> That's very good. I was going to say that "la'e" and "zo" were probably better left to lesson 87 rather than being introduced in the first lesson, but I see you are now starting with more simple stuff.

Thanks, I agree, {la'e} and {zo} are too advanced.

> You could use that as a "dictionary" and concentrate on the grammar, which of course will be the more difficult task.

Indeed, it's certainly the grammar which is the difficult task. I'm defining a few gismu here for use in examples, of course. The loi gismu liste is a nice resource (though a fair few of the pics aren't great). I've been taking onboard the experience of CLL and Rosetta Stone in their approaches to introducing languages. Hopefully this will help me get it in the right order.

>>1165
Good ideas, nice ways to encode more concepts at once. Although as to the precise geometry of what you are suggesting, I'm not sure. Can you post a little mspaint picture example (doesn't have to be fancy) to demonstrate?

> la jbobauctuxra == "The Lojbanic-Language-Teaching Picture(s)"

I think that's probably better than "picture teacher". I'll rename the title to "la lojbo bangu ctuca pixra".

Thanks for your comments, chaps.

>>1167

The idea being to always put the word that is the same for all the pictures in a series on the right, and the words that are different for each picture on the left. Or you could use some other spatial relationship, as long as you use the same system for every series of pictures.

>>1171
Interesting idea.

For this particular idea, it seems like it might be misinterpreted: What if it's interpreted to mean one utterance, a tanru?

I get the idea, though. Rather than X is a human, X is a man, just say "X is a human and a man".

But I don't think it needs much optimisation right now because I'm moving onto grammar from simple ontological (?) definitions, but I might do.

I'm trying to make the images with a certain perspective in mind. When I did the Arabic and Japanese Rosetta Stone tutorials, with a friend, we were presented with images and text, and really, despite not being able to read the text verbally, the only clues we had were what changed from slide to slide. We can't assume the words go from left to right, or that a space means a new word, or that the order of words is significant at any point. We can only recognise patterns and make up some reasoning about why it is that way. That is a perspective from a native English speaker to Arabic or Japanese, and I would therefore hope to make these pictures interpretable by someone from such a different culture and/or language. (You know this, I'm just writing it out for therapy sake.)

Some interesting results already: florolf (German, himself) asked a few fellow Germans, including his mother (monolingual), to interpret the pictures. There were some issues with {jgari} and {plipe} because the picture looked more like "lift" and "run", but that's okay, I improved the pictures to be more obvious.

For {ti}/{ta}/{tu}, however, it seemed the Germans interpreted it as she/he/it. I've since added an extra digram showing the scale of ti/ta/tu. That helped, it seems. Although a few people had trouble with {tu}, including florolf's questionees, and including my sister. We both reckon that is because there is no word for "yonder" in either language, anymore; though the word exists, it's antiquated. I, myself, found it a little novel that there was a {tu} when first learning Lojban.

I hope that this isn't going to be a hard problem to tackle, that is, the problem that is people are unable to recognise a concept from a picture because there is no (readily) corresponding word in their own language. But florolf mentioned this as a recognised Sapir-Whorf problem, so I might research that.

Fascinating issues, though.

But I think with a tutorial like this, you have to suspend your need for concrete definitions until you are given more material with which to make discernments. Also, at the beginning, it doesn't matter that much if you think {danlu} means "man, woman, cat and bird", because in future lessons I might say {lo gerku cu danlu} and that would need reconsideration, etc. etc.

florolf and other Germans also had some trouble with {danlu}, but I'm not really clear on why. Maybe he can shed some light on that.

It might be worth considering the use of comics style speech balloons for the cases when the words are being said by someone in the picture, since I assume you will need to use a lot of dialogue to teach some constructions. I think it would be better to establish that convention from the beginning with the simplest cases (like "mi").

>>1173

Good idea. I had indeed considered that speech bubbles would be needed. I'll change those images.

>>1172

> florolf and other Germans also had some trouble with {danlu}, but I'm not really clear on why. Maybe he can shed some light on that.

Possibly because they have no category which includes both humans and animals? (Many native speakers of English don't put humans in the category "animal", while biologists do; maybe German works that way too.)