Review of Lojban for Beginners (2002)

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Nick Nicholas (writer), Robin Turner (writer).

Read in 2024.

An introduction to contemporary Lojban, breaking down much of the reference grammar into manageable lessons with exercises.

It’s an impressive effort for a free book about an obscure language, but it’s ultimately a difficult read. The tone varies from the casual to the coyly academic and the humour is more miss than hit. The strict alienness of the language is not concealed; this makes its unique appeal shine through, but also its difficulty. I think I got a fair grounding in it, but more mnemonics would have been nice.

I made the mistake of reading the book in epub, and I could not find a reader that made it easy enough to flip from an exercise to its answer. That is no fault of the authors, but it made the exercises more irritating than they would have been on or with paper. Combined with my efforts to absorb the vocabulary through Anki, it took me three years to read the book from start to finish.

text non-fiction