learning toki pona

...is easy!

Content warning: Guy who's only seen Boss Baby talking about movies.

I learned toki pona three or four years ago because I felt like everyone in the community was full of it and I wanted to prove them wrong. Results were mixed. I still think many of the things people say about the language are crazy, but I had a lot of fun learning it and I think it was good for my brain. Let's discuss.

Better living through flashcards

If you, like my mother until a few weeks ago, somehow still haven't heard of Anki, this is your lucky day: I'm going to tell you about Anki. Anki is spaced repetition software. That means you make flashcards in it and the program shows you your flashcards at a rate such that you (hopefully) see a flashcard right as you were about to forget it. This lets you maximize the value of the time you spend studying while minimizing the number of flashcards you forget.

I have a personality disorder where I don't actually want to learn any specific thing, but I do really want to have flashcards to do. (Arguably this is no longer true of me, but it's definitely been true several times in my life.) toki pona suited this need perfectly.

If you somehow still haven't heard of toki pona, then you're a lot less weird than the Anki gang. To me, at least. toki pona is a conlang created by Sonja Lang in 2001. The name means "language of good," literally; however in toki pona the word for "good" ("pona") is also the word for "simple." Naturally if you meditate on this fact long enough you will understand all there is to know about toki pona.

In her first book about the language, Lang presents a vocabulary of 120 words. (Later she would add more, but I only learned a few of the latter-day words.) For someone just getting back into flashcards, this is a very, very acceptable number of flashcards. When I started learning toki pona, the last time I had seriously used Anki was in 2019, for the back half of my college Japanese studies. This involved many, many more flashcards.

This is the basics of my thesis about why toki pona is so great. If you can memorize 120 flashcards, you can more or less learn the language. If you're the kind of person for whom grammar doesn't stick quite so well, there might be more to it for you (though toki pona's grammar is also very simple!). For me, usually once I've learned a grammar, it stays learned; vocab is my stone to roll.

Memorizing toki pona

As I recall it, when I started to learn toki pona, I was in a phase with regard to "adult learning" where memorizing 120 of anything sounded vaguely impossible. In retrospect, this is frankly embarrassing, so let's hope I recall it wrong.

At any rate, I took it slow, working through jan Lentan's "lipu sona pona" (lit. BOOK of KNOWLEDGE and GOOD, or so) over the course of about two weeks and adding vocab words to my flashcards as I went. This dozen or so hours of work was really all it took to give me the absolute basics of fluency.

Of course, "fluency" depends on what you want. Can I hold a conversation in toki pona with a fellow speaker? Not unless they're willing to talk really, really slow. (And even then I'll certainly stumble.) But with enough time and concentration, I can talk with someone over text.

It's also, critically, been very easy to maintain. I'm still doing my toki pona flashcards, but most days that means 4 or 5 cards. I lapsed for most of 2024, but getting back on the horse didn't take too much work, just a few weeks of doing 40-50 cards a day. (Based on current numbers, this likely amounted to 15 minutes/day, tops.)

The part that's most important to me is, somehow, despite its simplicity, knowing toki pona still feels like knowing a second language. Because it's so simple, you have to work very hard to express yourself. "Direct translation" seems like a basically fake idea for all but the most trivial of sentences, but it's especially fake in toki pona. If you try to speak toki pona by mapping your native language into it one word at a time, you'll almost certainly wind up with a sentence that's so general as to be completely incomprehensible.

I learned a little bit of German in high school (barely counts tbh) and I took two semesters of Japanese in college. But I never got far enough with either to feel a non-English language become a natural part of me. Learning toki pona was the first time I got through the surface level work of language learning and into the proper mechanics, like how to think in a new language or how to approach a foreign language text as a reader rather than a student.

adorable little pictures.

Having learned toki pona as it's written in the Latin alphabet, I decided I also wanted to learn sitelen pona (lit. PICTURES of GOOD). This is a set of logographs, one per word, designed by Sonja Lang as a "native" writing system for toki pona. Like the language itself, they're generally very simple.

(I talked about my process and inspiration for learning sitelen pona on my gemlog. Surprise surprise, there were more flashcards.)

I learned the beginnings of some kanji in my formal Japanese education, but they never felt natural. Each was an independent struggle to keep meaningless squiggles straight in my mind. This may be mere bad self-history, but when I finally returned to my kanji studies earlier this year--that's a separate story--I found learning kanji to be much easier than I remembered it. Maybe it was just another five years of watching anime, but I like to think the sitelen pona helped knead my brain a bit more into shape.

Anyway, go forth and be bilingual! It's just not that hard! Everybody should have a couple of flashcards. What if you need to remember something someday? The better half of information management is having somewhere you'll remember to put the information when you come across it--! [dragged off stage by men in black shades]

The sitelen of the day is �

• Its meaning is ANIMAL.
• Its reading is そうぇり. *coughs* er, SOWELI.

But like omgggggg just look at himmmmmmm (it's not that I learned toki pona just for this word but it's also not not like that)