[conlang_learners] Conversing in the chosen one!

[Jim Henry]

2009/7/14 Olivier Simon <cafaristeir at yahoo.com>:

> About the time span, I think we shouldn't "stick" to one conlang more than 4
> months (or even less) before learning a new one.

4 months might be plenty for some conlangs, for some people -- but I
doubt it would be adequate for all the conlangs on our shortlist for
the majority of the people participating in the project.   Let's see
what conlang we pick and then decide how much time it suits to devote
to it exclusively before we start learning another conlang (which
needn't mean abandoning the first conlang, but would mean giving most
of our attention to the new one).


> with the language on another platform). We shall not forget that this
> project is a kind of scientific experiment

It could be an "experiment" if we had a control group, and learners
randomly assigned to each group.  As it is, I think the most we can
call it is a "study".


> and that it'd be interesting to
> compare what's easy and what's difficult with an on-line teaching, with
> people from all around the world.

Maybe so.   To my mind that's a secondary or tertiary goal of the
project, after attempting to build a speaker community around a
conlang that doesn't yet have one, and perhaps in the process building
up the conlang itself with a more fully specified grammar and lexicon
and certainly a larger corpus.  But if we can figure out a way to do a
halfway scientific comparison between different online teaching
methods, without impairing the primary goal of the project, that's
good.


> You know, on other forums, there are
> always Esperantists who claim that Esperanto is the sole "learnable"
> auxlang, cause they've got teachers everywhere... Non-sense !

I'll reply to this offlist or perhaps on AUXLANG, since it is starting
to drift offtopic for this list.


> (another idea is that we should first learn Sambahsa, and then be taught
> another conlang in Sambahsa !!! :-° ))

I would encourage you to translate the grammar, lessons, lexicon etc.
of whatever conlang we pick into Sambahsa, if we don't pick Sambahsa
itself.   If the project sticks with one conlang long enough, I hope
one of the outcomes will be a set of lessons, grammar, etc. for the
chosen conlang in more languages; we have list members here who could
potentially do such translations into French, German, Esperanto,
Lojban, and probably several other languages.

-- 
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/