Two Weeks of Learning Toki Pona #

You may or may not have heard of Toki Pona. If not, in a word, it is a popular conlang (meaning a human-made language) second only to Esperanto, with only 100+ basic words and simple grammar. Despite the simplicity, it is, as it claims, already a complete language capable of handling any topics with clarity and comfort.

I had already known of the language for quite a while but had never learned it until two weeks ago. Then, having been in a MUC of friends for some time where everyone else except me speaks Toki Pona, I decided to actually learn the language.

In two weeks, or more precisely 12 days, I finished my Toki Pona course, which included learning all the grammar and memorizing all the core and common words, with what's left to do being further honing my language skills through massive inputs and outputs because obviously you can't actually master a language in just 12 days. The experience, though, was fun and pleasant throughout, and I would certainly recommend that you have a try at it as well.

Learning resources #

To begin with, I chose the course lipu sona pona, which literally means "the good book." This is an online course well divided into 12-13 lessons, each a day, and is what my learning is mainly about. I also used Wasona as an auxiliary resource, as it provides some useful Q&As and complementary information.

While kick-starting your learning, you probably want to watch this video to get a general idea of how Toki Pona works. This way, most grammatical points will feel more familiar to you in later lessons. This cheat sheet could also be a useful quick reference.

For the vocabulary part, instead of just relying on the short English translations provided by the course for word definitions, I would recommend using an online Toki Pona dictionary like lipu Linku or nimi.li. The two are based on the same dataset, but I personally prefer using the latter because of the interface. What's important is that, apart from just providing a few English translations, they also provide other helpful information such as word usage, origin and most importantly, semantic space. With each entry, there is an article about the semantic space of the word that describes in greater detail what the word is and is not about, which I find very helpful in understanding a word.

The experience #

With all the resources, how has my learning gone? It actually went smoothly. Learning the language wasn't a difficult experience, and all it took was time.

The easiest part is grammar. Thanks to the aforementioned video and sheet, I was already able to have a good grasp of the grammar in the very first days. Toki Pona was designed to be easily learned, so the grammar was simplified to the maximum extent possible - no tense, voice, person, number, gender, inflection, or anything else. The grammar, though sometimes causing a little bit of ambiguity, is a lot simpler than those of Chinese and English, the languages which I speak, where there are random exceptions everywhere.

Being able to speak both languages also helped me learn the vocabulary. All words in Toki Pona originated from existing languages in the world, and there are quite a number of them from Mandarin, English, and their sister languages. But I bet not considering their origins, you'll still have a pleasant time memorizing them, as the spelling and pronunciation are so simple, and you don't have silent letters or suspicious syllables like those you get in English, plus there are only 120-140 words to remember after all. By the end of day 10, I had already memorized all core and common words - no flash card apps used and no rote memorizing. The key is to consult the dictionary often and familiarize yourself with the words through various inputs.

By various inputs, of course, we are not just talking about the course materials. There is this Toki Pona library that contains various works written in Toki Pona, though I personally haven't used it. However, while learning the language, I do come across some awesome Toki Pona songs like telo sewi, ale li ante, mi jaki and Toki Pona Caramelldansen. Some of them are extremely cute, and some of them are extremely emotive, but overall it's fascinating seeing how much such a simple language can express.

Listening and speaking (aloud) is definitely an important part, because learning a language is not just learning to read and write it. During the past two weeks, I repeatedly listened to those songs and gradually found myself understanding more and more of the lyrics. I also tried to transcribe the song and translate it and compared my work with the official lyrics to see where I went wrong. A general tip for listening is to not listen syllable by syllable or word by word, otherwise you'll have a hard time understanding something like "soweli lili li..." Instead, group the speech in chunks, and try to recognize and remember some common collocations of words and sentence patterns. The same applies to speaking.

Conclusion #

Again, the two-week experience was pleasant and fruitful. It was also an experience about learning to simplify my thoughts and express everything in 130-ish words.

While two weeks is, I think, the average time it takes to finish the basic courses, it certainly takes many months or years to get really fluent, as I've seen from many fluent speakers in the community. Thus, I'll probably continue honing my Toki Pona skills and see how far I can eventually get.

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