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|_| |_| |_|_|_| \___|\__,_|\___/ li sona e toki pona!
At some point, I learned Toki Pona!
I have a few problems with it, but I also think it is heaps of fun and is so damn easy that regardless of my problems (some of which may even be active design features), I'm pretty glad I learned. It's not a massive time investement like say, Esperanto, let alone a natural language. You could learn the grammar and vocab in a week (a weekend if you're going really fast), and then spend the rest of your learning time just getting better at it. There are like 140 words or so. The grammar is really simple (occasionally too simple to parse nicely), but not so simple that you can't express your thoughts.
It's super cute, too. "mi moku" -> "I eat". "pan suwi li pona tawa uta mi" -> "Sweet bread is tasty" (literally, "sweet bread is good to my mouth"). The grammar is dead simple.
Adjectives go immediately after nouns, adverbs immediately after verbs, and since all words can be used as any of the main parts of speech, it's mostly positionally based (for example, "telo moku" -> "consumable liquid" since moku is acting as an adjective upon telo; "moku telo" -> "liquid food", since telo is acting as an adjective on moku). Sentences mostly follow a "subject li verb e target" format, even if that's not the only setence form. If the subject is "mi" or "sina" on its own, then you drop the word "li".
There is more grammar than that (there are prepositions, like "lon" (in, at, on), "tawa" (to, towards), and "tan" (reason or origin), and I constantly wish there was some bit of grammar that made them separate from nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs since these words can still be used as those parts of speech - "tawa" can refer to movement as a noun, for example), but not much more.
You do a lot of phrase building to express concepts that don't exist as base words. For example, "telo nasa" -> "crazy liquid" -> alcohol, "tenpo suno open" -> "starting sun time" -> morning, and "ilo toki" -> "talk tool" -> phone.
I'm not really a part of the wider Toki Pona community since I never really got into Discord and I abandoned social media pretty much completely early this year (2024, and does YouTube count lol), so I'm not particularly certain of how good my Toki Pona is for others to read - I have commented to people in Toki Pona and they've understood it, but I also kept things incredibly simple since I didn't know how well I'd be able to write anything more complex, but also I didn't know how well the person reading it would understand. There is a lot of ungrammatical Toki Pona text on the internet, so it's hard to get a good read on how well you understand things if you don't yet know enough to be able to confidentely say that it's trash.
I reallly need to get Sonja Lang's recent translation of The Wizard of Oz. Her Toki Pona text is extremely easy to read and very well done, but she also hasn't really published much Toki Pona text at all across the three books, referred to in Toki Pona as lipu pu (the learning guide Toki Pona: The Language of Good), lipu ku (the Toki Pona Dictionary), and lipu su (the Wizard of Oz translation - technically, su refers to all the story translations, but as of this writing, there is only the one). I desperately wish she had provided some good long-form examples, the samples in lipu pu suck. She has a great, clearly understandable style (she did invent the language), but she also kept all her examples absurdly short, with scant few pages of long form text in lipu pu. Out of everything, I feel this is the gravest sin of Toki Pona, the lack of text written by her to read so you can have any confidence that you understand it or have a clear example to follow in your own writing. This might be deliberate, she doesn't want to force too many particulars on the users, but I feel like it has just made things harder for learners and I hate it.
My biggest use for Toki Pona right now is that I want to write songs in it using the VOICEVOX software. I want Zundamon to sing cutely in Toki Pona (particularly since the extremely simple sound set overlaps heavily with the one used in Japanese; it's signficantly better than trying to get Zundamon or any of the other VOICEVOX banks to speak English). I've been trying to convince my IRL friends to learn it with extremely limited success (one of four people that I thought would be interested is doing it).
I have so much I want to say and I need to organize it, so this page is a total work-in-progress. Whether I actually get to dealing with that, who knows, but
Below is a short bit of text that I wrote directly in Toki Pona and a not-quite-literal (but not quite freeform) translation to English:
mi kama sona e toki pona tan ni: lawa mi li lili a. mi wile kama sona e toki Nijon; taso toki Nijon li pali mute a. mi alasa e ni lon lipu Google: "toki seme li toki pi lili a?". lipu Google li pana a nimi pi Toki Pona tawa mi.
mi kama sona e toki pona kepeken tenpo lili. lipu pu li pana pona e sona pi toki pona tawa mi tan ni: li musi li lili li pona.
mi jo e pilin ike lili tawa toki pona... taso toki pona li pona (meso). mi wile suli e toki pona; taso jan ante li sona ala e nimi sin mi e nasin toki sin mi. tenpo mute la, toki pona li poki e mi; taso mi toki pona.
(kin la, mi sona ala e ni: jan ante li jo e kon toki sama mi anu seme tawa nimi "poki e")
pini la mi pilin e ni: toki pona li musi. mi sona e nasin toki ante tan toki pona! pona a!
I learned Toki Pona because I'm a dummy. I want to learn Japanese... but it is a lot of work. So, I looked up "what language is the smallest" on Google, and it brought up Toki Pona.
I've got a few gripes about Toki Pona, but it's (mostly) good. I'd love to expand the language, but if I did, other people wouldn't know what I'm saying with my new words and grammar. A lot of the time, Toki Pona limits me, but I still speak it.
(also, I don't know if someone else would have the same meaning or not for the phrase "poki e")
In the end, I feel that Toki Pona is fun. I know another language because of Toki Pona. Cool!
At some point, I'll try and clean up this page, this is just a first draft. It's a big enough topic that it's not just a blog entry. I do sound terribly negative for something in my "things I like" section, but despite my issues with the language, I really do enjoy using it. I might either add my list complaints to this page, or I might write a blog entry, who knows.
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