1. Greetings

coi rodo [Shoy-roh-doh]. Hello, everybody!

“My First Lojban” (“Hajimete no Lojban”, or “HajiLoji”) has been in development since September 2013. This second version, along with the transfer to a new site, was started in April 2015. It’s still not quite complete, but the finished articles have been released.

As with the first version, the writing was done by cogas, and the illustrations of the three cute protagonists were drawn by Vae. Also, continuing the trend from the first version, many of the teachings are due to guskant, who I’d like to thank. youxkei helped out with the transfer to the new site and improved the source code. Furthermore, HajiLoji enjoyed the support of various members of the PJCG (ponjo lojbo citno girzu / Japanese Lojban group). I would like to thank you all in this little space. ki’e sai

(Note from la lalxu: hello, reader! It’s July 2018 as I’m translating this. I, too, would like to thank the Japanese Lojban community for creating such a wonderful cute guide to a conlang that’s very important to me. ありがとうございます。 Sometimes, when I’m completely baffled by a sentence that doesn’t seem so relevant, I’ve simply left it untranslated. In general, free to help out with the translation effort on GitHub.)

At the time of writing HajiLoji 2, its roughness was the number one priority.

After all, the original purpose of HajiLoji was:

To write a Lojban manual that makse you think “Oh, Lojban isn’t a big deal after all! It’s actually easy!”

Despite that, and owing to the author’s clumsiness, the contents of the first edition were not something you’d call beginner-friendly. The result was harder to understand than its predecessors “Hajimete no Arka” and “Hajimete no Esperanto”.

So, HajiLoji version 2 is an attempt to once again capture the spirit of its predecessors – to “present a rough idea of Lojban”.

One the other hand, this might be a little unsatisfactory for those who want to study Lojban in all of its depth. Also, it may prove irksome to those who worry about all the little details too much.

This is why HajiLoji 2 includes supplementary materials and a “FAQ” section, where details that don’t come up in the story but are often asked about are explained.

Another point HajiLoji 2 focuses on is “de facto standards”. This has to do with the “rough” approach: Lojban offers so much freedom that it would be very complex to explain all the possibilities in detail.

HajiLoji 2 tries to present “Lojban as people generally use it”. For example, it is generally written in ASCII characters, and written in what’s called “subject-verb-object” word order. It certainly isn’t a bad thing to study Lojban’s freedoms in-depth, but I don’t think it’s a bad idea to start off with a solid foundation either.

はじロジ２の段階でもなお、ロジバンは文法の研鑽が盛んに行われています。

HajiLoji 2 uses CLL version 1.0 as a reference material, but all semantics follow the newest BPFK rulings. For this reason, please understand that some explanations may differ from those in CLL, for example especially those concerning gadri (the articles lo/le).

With that, we’re ready to have start looking at the world through our telescope called Lojban! Have fun!

・・・・・

Hello, everyone! coi rodo! My name is Koshon. Nice to meet you.

Hey, what’s up! I’m Sora! …So, Koshon, what’s “shoy roh doh”?

That’s a greeting in Lojban, a constructed language. It means “hello, everyone”.

Whoa! That sounds nifty. Hm, when I hear that “Loj”, I can’t help but think of “logic”.

How observant of you. Yes, Lojban belongs to the category of “logical constructed languages” (loglangs). Lojban, well, has some tricks up its sleeve to make the grammar really easy to learn. How does that sound, Sora?

Well, if you say it’s easy… Alright, I’ll give it a shot!

・・・

That’s my line, right—

Let’s move on.