What is lojban?

• a small but flexible vocabulary
• an unambiguous grammar
• an optional tense system
• an orthogonal feature set
  • (ignore this if it doesn't mean much to you!)
• a small but growing (slowly) group of readers, writers and speakers.

Why should I care?

• It's weird
  • and therefore mind-stretching and interesting
• It improves logical reasoning capability (unproven!)
• It may be a useful international auxilliary language
• It may be useful for communicating with computers
• It may be a useful intermediary language in automated translation
• It almost certainly helps in learning other languages
  • You might also be interested in my thoughts on Learning Languages.

What?

It's generally accepted that, broadly speaking, learning your first non-cradle language takes about 4 years of study, and then each subsequent language takes about two years. The difference comes because part of learning your first language is breaking old habits and finding your best way to learn ...

Lojban, in contrast with natural languages, can be learned in just a few weeks, and fluency can be achieved in just a few months of study and practice. Not being a natural language it's quite likely that some of the "new language" benefits aren't there, but even so, if learning lojban can shave six months off learning your first non-cradle natural language, then it's still faster to learn lojban first, and then learn another language.

Perhaps lojban may even be the new Latin - that's starting to be used again in schools ...

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6570171.stm

Examples

mi cu tavla do	I talk to you
mi cu tavla do ti	I talk to you about this_thing_here_at_which_I_point
mi cu tavla do ta	I talk to you about that_thing_there_at_which_I_point
mi cu tavla do la lojban	I talk to you about the thing called lojban
mi cu tavla do le zarci	I talk to you about the market
lo zarci cu barda	The market is big
mi pu tavla	I spoke
mi pu tavla lo barda zarci	I spoke about the big market
mi pu tavla	I spoke
mi pupu tavla	I had spoken
mi pupuzi tavla	I had just spoken
do ba tavla fi lo zarci	You will speak about the market
mi puzi citka	I have just eaten

Test yourself ...

• (Easy) This is big
• (moderate) I will soon eat
• (Quite hard) I was about to talk to you

• ko ze'u jmive gi'e snada

Quotation from Tim Berners-Lee