I started learning Toki Pona about three weeks ago and I’ve memorized almost all 137 core words. It’s definitely possible to memorize them faster, I’ve just been working on Toki Pona along with my other projects. Some background about the language: Toki Pona is a constructed language created by Sonja Lang in 2001 with a focus on minimalism. I started learning it because I find the idea of a minimalist language fascinating and because it’s so approachable. I’m a native English speaker and I previously studied Chinese and French, although I remember almost nothing of them. But what I do remember is the distinct feeling of just how monumental the task of learning them was; the feeling that every word I learned was a drop in an endless ocean. I’m drawn to Toki Pona because of how achievable it is. Like, just 137 words? I can do that. (Sidenote: I found Toki Pona thanks to this TIC-80 program by Podepi. Just goes to show, you sometimes find things in the most unusual places.)
I’m surprised by how quickly even the natural world overwhelms its base vocabulary and I have to resort to compound words. Like leaf (kasi lipu), ocean (telo suli), and rain (telo tan sewi). It really makes me realize the shear scale of the English vocabulary. If my stack of 105 flashcards seems large, then English must fill a room!
To end this post, here’s the resources I’m using so far: Toki Pona Dictionary (ku), Toki Pona: The Language of Good (pu), flashcards, and jan Misali’s 12 Days of Toki Pona video series. That’s all for today, see you soon with another Toki Pona update! mi tawa!
I have a thesis that Toki Pona is to natural languages what alphabets like Latin are to logographic writing systems like Chinese. In other words if you know what you’re doing you can express anything. I did a video introduction to non-Euclidean geometry as a proof of concept.
Here’s a link to my blog: https://joelthomastr.github.io/tokipona/README_en
That’s so cool! I’m nowhere near that level yet and it’s fascinating to see how far Toki Pona can go. Thank you for the link!
I would say ‘lipu kasi’ for leaf … but I can’t really explain why …
Toki Pona is quite interesting because it enables one to see what the introduction of an extra word does to the complete semantic field distribution of words …
The dictionary also says “lipu kasi”. I guess it depends on which is more important, that leaves are plant-like or paper-like? “lipu kasi” makes me think of a book with leaves for pages, but that’s probably just because I’m not used to it