Perhaps Word of the Day by e-mail, a la Dictionary.com's Word of the Day?

Advantages are

• cross platform from the word go,
• less complex (than writing an application for a platform) and thus
• less subject to bugs,
• in a familiar format (X of the Day),
• easy to “uninstall”; just unsubscribe,
• if the Word of the Day is also on the Lojban site, it can be accessed from anywhere without having to login to one's inbox.

Disadvantages are

• it would have to be at least daily, hourly would be spamming,
• isn't a “desktop presence” of Lojban; that is, Lojbanic software in your every day work,

Comment too long. Click here to view the full text.

There's an awesome Word of the Day project at http://valsi.blogspot.com/

>>38
Indeed, that blog is brilliant. If you want to bookmark just the latest word of the week, I recommend:

http://valsi.blogspot.com/search?max-results=1

:)

>>35

> But it's also more useful if it's usefully limited. If we had some sort of organized progression of lessons, we could make cheat sheets to go with the lessons; that would be the most directly useful .ia

That goes very well with the idea of the Lojban proficiency test, also mentioned in /ideas/.

>>36

Yeah, there's a test to pass, certain knowledge you have to know, and organizations of that knowledge into things like cheat sheets. The basic problem is breaking it down into chunks; once we've got the chunks we can teach them in all different media.

I'm starting a Color School (la skari ckule), which has a very basic curriculum: You learn the names of the twelve colors: blanu, xunre, pelxu, zirpu, narju, crino, blabi, xekri, grusi, bunre, nukni, cicna. Twey already made a beautiful cheat sheet for this class: http://jbotcan.org/jbo/src/1208676033595.png

>>37

> The basic problem is breaking it down into chunks; once we've got the chunks we can teach them in all different media.

By "chunks" do you mean subject matter or grammatical matter? I would assume you could use most language books as a reference for how to structure the subject matter.

Well, I know Flash and ActionScript, the rest (leaderboards) is cake. I'll try to think of some interesting non-annoying ideas for games and get back to you.

I think this could fit brilliantly with my idea of a Color Teaching Era (la skari ctuca cedra). I'm thinking of the various tetrisesque games where you need to match colors to clear them. It could start with the Lojban text for a color on a background of the color, so you could start playing without recognizing any of the words. As you got to higher levels, there would be occasional blocks with only the label and/or the colors would get dimmer and harder to distinguish. Then at the highest levels, the blocks could have only the rafsi.

One game that might work well is a hunting flash game, where you kill and/or capture animals of all classes by using Lojban words as bait, weapons, or equipment.

This is a very interesting idea! Additionally, it might also be useful so that people can judge how much advanced Lojban should be used when talking to someone else.

If a text test was devised of this nature, me or I'm sure someone else would happily implement this as an interactive online test.

do want.

>>6

OP here. I shouldn't have wrote this in the morning on four hours of sleep before coffee. I don't know how that second "Lojban" in the first sentence got there!

Of course, this kind of commitment to learning a language is only worth something if you can use it. This is why I really need to encourage a personal friend to use it, because, although the Lojban people are mostly nice people, often the only thing I have in common with them is that we are both interested in Lojban, it's not like we would be friends otherwise. So I really need to get one of my friends to learn it.

Also, /jbo/ is supposed to be immersion but there is not much to talk about -- you're not going to bother bringing something up if you don't have to because it's such hard work, and is usually met with corrections (from people acting in good faith, of course).

I have just completed a 10 week British Sign Language course and that was easy enough, once a week on Tuesday. I have an okay grasp and confidence that I could learn any language with commitment. The trouble is that I don't know any deaf people, never mind deaf friends so I am finding it difficult being motivated.

I have a friend who at one time was interested in learning Latin with me, like our own little club language (juvenile, yes). But that kind of fun could be applied to Lojban. I just have to get back into contact with him...

>>3

I actually started a club of about 8 people for Lojban at my university, where we would get together every week for an hour and learn something from Lojban For Beginners. This is where the LLG can come in, because I had the opportunity to say if I was "affiliated with any national organization" or something to that extent and was tempted to put the LLG.

I think the solution to that might be "Lojban awareness" where the goal is simply to make Lojban as known as possible, even if people don't necessarily have an interest in it. Establishing some kind of lobby or interest group that persuades universities to have courses on Lojban would be a huge step up. I've seen some really obscure (from a layman's standpoint) natural languages in large universities such as UT, so I don't think they wouldn't be open to the idea of a Lojban course.

>>4

> I actually started a club of about 8 people for Lojban at my university, where we would get together every week for an hour and learn something from Lojban For Beginners.

That's pretty sweet.

> I think the solution to that might be "Lojban awareness" where the goal is simply to make Lojban as known as possible, even if people don't necessarily have an interest in it.

Learning it as a second language in the name of internationalism could be interesting... I don't really know how this persuading universities to do courses stuff works, but if you can pull something like that off, I'd like to hear about it.

Wow, lots of ideas here.