(no subject)
Sometimes when I use the Lojban vocabulary program, I try to come up with mnemonics for whatever word I'm looking at currently. Not really in a "dog stuck in an envelope, mailed to an unlucky black cat playing with yarn by the window" kind of way, but more like when I see tcati (x1 is made of/contains/is a quantity of tea brewed from leaves x2), I think of the image of a cup of tea, try to remember its smell and taste, and generally imagine the full mental image of tea. This rather than thinking "tea tea tea tea tea tea tea", because I think learning a language is less about knowing which words the words you're learning can replace, and more about knowing what they really mean, in that mental image sense.
Other times, though, I remember things by playing with a sumti place (x1, x2, etc.) that I think is really interesting. Like the second one in tcati. x1 is tea made from leaves x2, which means that x2 refers to tea leaves. You say {le se tcati}, and that's "the tea leaves". (All you English speakers out there: am I talking about the leaves used to brew tea, or am I talking about a cup of tea going away?) Which means you can then say things like {lo tcidu be fi lo se tcati cu troci lenu cusku lo balvi fasnu}, meaning "Readers of tea leaves are trying to tell the future." (Or, if you want the literal translation, "Any/some reader(s) (reading material: tea leaves) is/are doing/being attempting the event of saying/expressing that/those which really are later (type-of) occurrences.") Then it's pretty hard for me to forget what {tcati} means. Also, ocha is Japanese for tea, so there's a nice link there.
(Come to think of it, I've been in a couple of situations wherein my Lojban knowledge has helped me grasp concepts in Japanese. In Lojban, for instance, there's a word {xu} which turns whatever bridi it's in into a true/false question. There are also words like {ma} which ask the listener to fill in the sumti place (so if I say, "do pu cusku ma", it basically means "What did you say?"). So when I started learning Japanese, and we came across ka, a Sentence Particle that turns the entire sentence into a question (true/false, fill-in-the blank, or whatever, a little more cover-all than the Lojban question words), I was not only fine with it, but almost recognized it as an old friend.)
P.S.: The wiggly brackets are what a lot of people on the Lojban beginner's list use to signal that a chunk of Lojban is coming. Seems like a worthwhile device to me.
Other times, though, I remember things by playing with a sumti place (x1, x2, etc.) that I think is really interesting. Like the second one in tcati. x1 is tea made from leaves x2, which means that x2 refers to tea leaves. You say {le se tcati}, and that's "the tea leaves". (All you English speakers out there: am I talking about the leaves used to brew tea, or am I talking about a cup of tea going away?) Which means you can then say things like {lo tcidu be fi lo se tcati cu troci lenu cusku lo balvi fasnu}, meaning "Readers of tea leaves are trying to tell the future." (Or, if you want the literal translation, "Any/some reader(s) (reading material: tea leaves) is/are doing/being attempting the event of saying/expressing that/those which really are later (type-of) occurrences.") Then it's pretty hard for me to forget what {tcati} means. Also, ocha is Japanese for tea, so there's a nice link there.
(Come to think of it, I've been in a couple of situations wherein my Lojban knowledge has helped me grasp concepts in Japanese. In Lojban, for instance, there's a word {xu} which turns whatever bridi it's in into a true/false question. There are also words like {ma} which ask the listener to fill in the sumti place (so if I say, "do pu cusku ma", it basically means "What did you say?"). So when I started learning Japanese, and we came across ka, a Sentence Particle that turns the entire sentence into a question (true/false, fill-in-the blank, or whatever, a little more cover-all than the Lojban question words), I was not only fine with it, but almost recognized it as an old friend.)
P.S.: The wiggly brackets are what a lot of people on the Lojban beginner's list use to signal that a chunk of Lojban is coming. Seems like a worthwhile device to me.