tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Thu Feb 17 06:56:23 1994
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
beginners
- From: Captain Krankor <[email protected]>
- Subject: beginners
- Date: Thu, 17 Feb 94 17:57:43 -0700
I'd like to address the issue of beginners.
This list is absolutely, positively, no-two-ways-about-it intended
to support beginners as part of its function.
We have been extremely fortunate in that the number of advanced
people has grown considerably, and this is terrific, but it does
seem that in the wake of this, we have let the needs of beginners go
largely unfulfilled. Something is seriously awry if people start to
feel they must start another list to do beginner work. The primary
raison d'etre of this list is to facilitate learning and practice of
the language, and that absolutely goes for beginners. To be sure, I'm
probably the most guilty here for letting this state of affairs
evolve. Well, it is time to fix things.
I propose a three-part standard:
1) Let's run beginner conversation here with an appropriate subject
indicator.
2) Let us put the keyboard *BEGINNER* at the beginning of all such
posts. This is to remind more advanced people who read and reply to
such posts to tone down and keep it simple. (In particular, it is a
reminder for *me*, since I intend to read and participate in the
beginner conversation). The subject header is probably insufficient
for this, since, there are people (myself, at least) who just look
at everything that goes by.
3) The issue of corrections needs to be addressed. I strongly feel
that it is a BAD idea to have no structure for correction at all,
because if people don't get appropriate, direct feedback, they will
just get set in their incorrect ways. It is hard enough to learn;
having to UN-learn is an unnecessary extra burden.
On the other hand, having everybody correcting everybody else is
indeed a problem, which is why the grammarian system was instituted
here. It is not perfect, but I think it works pretty well. Since I
intend to read the beginner stuff, I can act in that role, however,
because the beginner errors should be pretty straight-forward, this
might be an excellent time for someone else who thinks they know
their stuff to take a crack at it, just for the extra practice.
Anybody wanna volunteer to do corrections for the beginner
discussion? Send me mail: [email protected]
Again, the role of this person will be to provide supportive
clarification and correction, including judging what is of universal
value and what might be better taken off line in private e-mail
(although I suspect that for the beginners, most things will wanna
go public, at least for a while). The role is not to berate people
for mistakes or show off how smart you are.
--Krankor