This post was originally posted on Babelhut.
I had once assumed that if I were to learn a constructed language, it would be Esperanto. It seems to be the most popular conlang out there, with several studies done on its effectiveness on improving language-aquisition skills. But last week my brother reminded me what assuming does and convinced me to start learning Lojban with him. Lojban is described as a logical language with unambiguous grammar, so it should be easier to learn than a natural language.
Lojban.org describes the features of the language as such:
- Lojban is designed to be used by people in communication with each other, and possibly in the future with computers.
- Lojban is designed to be culturally neutral .
- Lojban has an unambiguous grammar , which is based on the principles of logic .
- Lojban has phonetic spelling , and unambiguous resolution of sounds into words.
- Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn.
- Lojban’s 1300 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary of millions of words .
- Lojban is regular; the rules of the language are without exception .
- Lojban attempts to remove restrictions on creative and clear thought and communication.
- Lojban has a variety of uses , ranging from the creative to the scientific, from the theoretical to the practical.
Why learn it?
Everyone’s reasons for learning a particular language are personal, whether that language is natural or constructed. For my brother and I, we have always had similar interests, including an interest in learning other languages, but we’ve never agreed on a language to learn. I took German in high school, he took French. I primarily study Spanish now, he studies Japanese on occasion. With both of us studying Lojban, we now have a language that we both study together, and in theory requires less time and energy than a natural language to learn. Hopefully this means we can quickly be effective in communicating with each using Lojban.
Lojban Resources
- http://www.lojban.org – Official site of the Lojban language
- https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Word_Lists – Lojban word lists and dictionaries
- https://web.archive.org/web/20081223013956/https://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/lojbanbrochure/lessons/book1.html – Lojban for beginners