History: Lojbanic Phone Group

The Lojbanic phone group is an idea I had a few months back after it became clear that the internet-based phone chat idea was just too much of a hurdle for most people to overcome; there were *way* too many technical problems to make it feasible, even for the professional computer geeks.

• Note added in 2004: IP phone seems to work much better now, see Skype.

So, my idea was that people should split up into pairs and call each other at mutually convenient times for chats in Lojban.

The overall goal being to establish a broad level of conversational fluency in the lojban community.

There is a mailing list for discussing the phone group; it is called jbofongri, and can be found at the usual place.

Phone Group Topics

A lot of people have expressed concern about the phone group with respect to the "well, what would we talk about?" issue. I'm pretty sure that discussions about that will take up a lot of space, so please see the Phone Group Topics page.

Nowadays, Story Time With Uncle Robin is a recurring topic.

Current Members

If you add yourself here, please also join the jbofongri mailing list!!

Joining

We welcome anyone, regardless of expertise, physical location or monetary resources. If you can't speak much lojban, well, learning to understand others will help. If you can't afford to make long distance phone calls, one of the other members will be happy to call you. If that doesn't work, I'm willing to pony up calling card money just to get this going.

To join, enter your information in the table above, then join the mailing list at the usual place and announce yourself there and ask who might be available to talk with you.

In an ideal universe, I'd like to see people matched up with people of very different levels of ability, to spread the expertise around as quiclky as possible, but I'm not hugely attached to that.

Lojban On The Phone

Please bear in mind, everyone, that collision avoidance is hard on the phone. Please become familiar with ta'a, re'i, be'e, je'e, ki'a and ke'o. Especially that last one.

Here's a phonetic alphabet for spelling words on the phone.

About Expertise

The "expertise" field in the members table is currently rather informal, and you are welcome to alter yours as you feel appropriate. However, I have had my expertise certified, as it were, by Nick Nicholas, in person. The reason I bothered, besides my ego, was that I want the option of making the phone group into a ranking system, similar to Chess rankings. In other words, if you want to be certified Expert level, you ask me or Nick to take some time to call you up and basically hammer away at you for an hour. You, in turn, can then certify people at rankings below Expert (or, possibly, at or below expert).

I doubt very much that it's necessary to say so, but please note that any use of word lists in any such tests would be cheating.

The infrastructure to do this is not in place, but I'd like people to keep it in mind as a future goal. Thanks to tsali's accidental suggestion, allow me to suggest that we will probably charge for the certification, all proceeds to the LLG of course.

Expertise Rankings

• Fluent: No concious thought required to speak in Lojban for any but the most complex conversations, and even then the mental work should not normally be about Lojbanic grammar or vocabulary. A good test for Fluency is whether you are able to engage in a complicated Lojban conversation whilst also doing something else, something that you could do at the same time as having a conversation in your native toungue.
• Expert: Able to engage in conversation in lojban with only minor and occasional pauses for thought.
• Intermediate: Comfortable with one of Lojban grammar or Lojban vocabulary, but not both.
• Beginner: Requires word lists to converse, not comfortable with Lojban grammar.

Note that all expertise rankings mentioned on this page are with respect to spoken, conversational Lojban only. Note further that neither Nick or I consider ourselves Fluent. Everyone else seems to consider Nick fluent, though, so this may just be that we have high standards of the word Fluency. Since I started this group, though, I get to define the terms.