View source for Lojban Wave Lessons/Foreword

These lessons are an attempt to expand on the Lessons originally started in Google Wave network, an excellent Lojban tutorial authored by la .kribacr., la xalbo, and transcribed by Marenz (which were parallel to lessons 1-4 of this tutorial). It explains newer rules of Lojban not covered by older materials such as "What is Lojban?" and "Lojban for Beginners".

If you are new to Lojban, I recommend listening to any recordings you can find of spoken Lojban ([[multimedia|readings]], [[lojban music|music]], [[Recordings of live Lojban discussions|conversation]]) both before and while you are taking this tutorial, in order to make yourself familiar with the sounds and words of the language. Furthermore, try to say the things you read in Lojban accent if it's reasonably practical. This can help your pronunciation a lot.

When taking this tutorial, it's best to pause between lessons in order to internalize what you have learnt. I have attempted to build these lessons from the bottom up and exclude any words or concepts that have not been explained in previous lessons. Once explained, they are used freely throughout the remainder of the tutorial. I urge readers not to pass any misunderstood content; if you have questions or are uncertain about something, feel free to ask the Lojban community, which can be found in [[Lojban Live Chat]] or on [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lojban Google Groups]. They will be happy to help.

In this tutorial, Lojban text is written in '''bold'''. Later, when Lojban loanwords are used in English sentences, they are not marked. Answers to exercises are displayed as a grey bar. Highlight the text in order to see it. English terms are written in ''italic''.

Lastly, I have as far as possible attempted to use the Lojban words for grammatical constructs: '''sumka'i''' instead of ''pro-sumti'', '''sumtcita''' instead of ''modal'' and '''jufra''' instead of ''utterance''. This is because I feel the English words are often either arbitrary, in which case they are just more words to learn, or misleading, in which case they are worse than useless. In either case, as long as the words are specific to those who are learning Lojban anyway, there is no reason for them to exist as separate English words.