books

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There are two published books that teach Lojban; The Complete Lojban Language and What is Lojban?. There is also an incomplete but substantial guide, Lojban for Beginners, which teaches Lojban as a course.

The Complete Lojban Language

"The Complete Lojban Language" is a complete description of the artificial language Lojban. It serves as a reference grammar for the language, offering an overview of the language, as well as linguistic details on every aspect of the language. This book serves as the standard defining the language design. That design has been declared frozen for a minimum 5 year period; anyone who learns the language from this book can be assured that it will not be continually changing. Though this description may sound imposing, technical and formal, the book is written in a light, often humorous style that teaches the reader about the Lojban language, about logic, and about linguistics in general.

An online version of The CLL called The Lojban Reference Grammar is available. A list of CLL, aka Reference Grammar, Errata is also available. Most of the errata have been approved.

New methods

The Complete Lojban Language

la xunre cukta

Note that the book The Complete Lojban Language is still considered by quite a few new learners as the best tutorial although by design this wasn't meant to be any tutorial.

Namely, the order of chapters may seem to be arbitrary to those who wish to use this book to study Lojban. So one recommendation is ... to read various sections from the book randomly. If you don't understand something skip to another part.

If you still wish to try something else here are some newish tutorials.

Newer methods

search the dictionary
la sutysisku.png
la camxes is an automatic grammar checker of Lojban utterances. It can help you to understand the structure and correctness of sentences.

'Learn Lojban' course

A course teaching Lojban from its formal foundations but in simple words and lots of usage examples.

Lojban cards

a rapid-fire overview of the grammar in small pieces

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Lojban in simple phrases

Also available in PDF.

You may translate and adapt this course to your native language if it's not already there.

try searching for arbitrary words in

the database of sentences La Muplis.png

Some of the sentences are not proofread by fluent speakers of Lojban.

lojban.io

a free opensource platform for studying Lojban with the aid of interactive exercises.

Wave Lessons

a popular textbook

My First Lojban

Learn the foundations of Lojban grammar by reading the light-hearted conversations between three girls.

Lojban guide

Provides hover translations of both sentences/phrases and words they contain.

Simple Lojban in phrases

A flashcard course on memrise.com.

Memrise.com offers other vocabulary flashcards online.

Anki is a downloadable alternative; search for "Lojban" in it.

A book with pictures and English translations

Learning with context: about this method ...

Join the chat lo-se-irci.svg

and try talking to other Lojbanists when they appear there. Try asking them questions.

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«Lessons in Lojban» by Dustin Lacewell

Earlier methods

What is Lojban?

"What is Lojban?" is intended as a concise introduction to Lojban, providing a taste of the language for those who may decide to take an interest in it.

Lojban for Beginners

"Lojban for Beginners" is an introductory course on Lojban, consisting of fifteen lessons. It has been authored by Robin Turner and Nick Nicholas, and gives a gentle introduction to the structure of the language. Robin authored lessons 1–8 and 10–11 in 1999; Nick added to the existing lessons, and authored lessons 9 and 12–15, in 2001. This book is very accessible, and interacts with the reader using relevant exercises.

There is 逻辑语入门 (a PDF Chinese version)

The errata for this book lives on this page.

The Dictionary

A Lojban-English and English-Lojban dictionary. This PDF version has some nice additions to the run-of-the-mill dictionary:

  • All the "See also" and "cf." lists are converted to links for easy navigation
  • All the words and rafsi appear in tiny white-on-white letters surrounded by dollar signs. This allows you to search for rafsi. For example, looking for $bli$ will get to to bliku.
  • Some "cheat sheets" are included to help the aspiring lojbanist.
  • Lojban words that are referenced from other definitions, but which don't have definitions of their own are listed in an appendix. The reader is encouraged to go and fix jbovlaste.
  • Lojban words that don't have English definitions that map to them are also listed in an appendix.

Lojban Dictionary.pdf is the same as ld.pdf except that AmberShadow has added bookmarks for your navigating pleasure. It also appears to be about half the size in megabytes for no apparent reason. Current version: Edition 8

Seth Lojban Dictionary.pdf is a file designed for print-on-demand machines like the one on BYU campus. Seth Lojban Dictionary Cover.pdf is the book's cover, in similar style to the printable version of LFB. POD machines often require the cover and book to be separate files. The dictionary itself is simply the standard word lists put into a very friend format (no lujvo and such, because of the incomplete nature of such a list). I have used it for a few months and liked it enough to put up for anyone's use. I can also arrange for printed versions of it to be available if there is a desire.

The Lojban Wave Lessons

Lojban Wave Lessons are a set of online lessons created by kribacr and a community of other Lojbanists that employ newer methods of teaching, including teaching the use of terminators as obligatory for the first several lessons and teaching xorlo and dotside as the normal rules. This is preferred over L4B or CLL by some students and recommended by several teachers as it teaches early on several key concepts which prevent confusion later on.