[conlang_learners] Conversing in the chosen one!

[M.S. Soderquist]

Jim Henry wrote:
> 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).
>
>   
Just to throw in my agreement here, 4 months is in no way adequate for 
me. Despite my interest in languages, I am a slow learner of languages 
and an otherwise busy person. I am just hoping to keep up. I am not sure 
I'll have a conversational grasp after 4 months.

(snippage): Suffice it to say I have no interest in testing the 
learnability of multiple languages, even though I have no particular 
preference for any type or level of complexity in whatever language we 
choose.
> 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.
>
>   
^^ This is far more interesting to me, and that's why I am here. If 
nothing else, I'd expect the conlang chosen to come out with more 
instructional materials and samples of the written language (of varying 
quality). I do hope that we can find a way to work voice chat into this 
at some point, too.