Malay, lojban, and pocket money for bookwork

• home education

Not “versus” because it’s not a contest. Not really.

I’m about to give up on my Malay Anki deck, mostly because it’s not ordered in a way that makes logical sense to me. I grew up hearing a lot of Malay, sadly I didn’t learn it formally because I couldn’t be bothered going to Malay school on Saturday mornings (I already went to school five days a week, why in the hell would I want to go on a sixth?) and I didn’t pick up nearly enough in daily life (partially because I think my parents were more concerned about me speaking and writing decent English while going through school, partially because I had for a very long time this idiotic notion that if I couldn’t grasp something the very second it was presented then I was obviously too stupid to live, and mostly because I was probably too damn lazy to pay proper attention). I figured that I should just be able to pick it back up, and I did to a degree. I’m not sure how the deck was structured, perhaps relevance to something that wasn’t relevant to me. There were many instances where I wondered why the root word hadn’t been introduced before a word that built off it.

I need better resources. I can’t seem to locate the Indonesian textbook I had from uni. I think I’ll try to sort something out with Mum.

I’ve been finding my lojban deck a lot easier to get through, as the one I’m using is ordered by usage frequency which makes remembering them a lot easier. Once I’ve got that deck dialled there are other ones floating around the place that I’ll grab, and I really have to study the grammar reference a lot more, and try to work my way through that confusing mess of resources on lojban.org. Talking to people would also help, and in that regard I could get my arse on irc and I could talk to the people in my lojban G+ circle (there are lojban people on D* but they don’t say much). Earlier in the year I was attempting to do socnet posts in both English and lojban, that’s fallen by the wayside a bit as I haven’t been looking at lojban grammar and thus am incapable of anything beyond extremely basic sentence fragments. If I really got back into it I could probably throw something together to teach the kids.

As far as I’m concerned either language is equally fine to teach the kids some Language Other Than English, as is Auslan, which I started teaching the kids before they started talking but never managed to continue. However the conlangs seem to receive some measure of derision as being useless languages because “no one” speaks them (aside from the people that do, but they don’t count because “no one” knows them, good thing I am no one). Otherwise apparently the only conlang worth learning is Esperanto because a lot of people speak it and it’s the most popular.

Hopefully next week the kids will actually be able to do some LOTE related stuff, assuming I can work fast enough to cobble something together for them.

They want pocket money so we’ve started this new thing where we’ve assigned broad subject areas to each week day (science, maths, PE, LOTE and English) and each day they do a double-page from a related workbook (otherwise we don’t do bookwork unless they feel like it which is extremely infrequently, and then a lot gets done). If they do all their pages and participate in the kung fu class (it’s a 2hr class so I don’t expect them to do even half of it, they do come in and train for 10 minutes or so at a time) they get $5 at the end of the week, and up to $10 if they do more. So far, so good. Except that we haven’t done LOTE stuff due to aforementioned problems and 5yo was quite upset that it hasn’t been checked off yet. I’d better go give them their money from the previous week.

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