Oh what would happen if you had a stroke or an accident and lost your language and you had to relearn it from scratch? How about this would happen to a person close to you? What about if your child suddenly couldn’t hear or speak ? It would take years to learn the sign language.
Sonja Lang invented a simple language that can be learned in one day. See the result below:
There are many other situations where it would be beneficial to have a language that can be learned in such a short time span. Think about people who fall in love with each other but do not speak the same language. Or think about people travelling to a country where they do not know the local language. In a very short time the host and the guest could communicate. Hotel and Restaurtant owners could indicate if they had mastered Toki Pona. The same would be apply for other business and other work related matters.
Specific in sports think about a trainer going to train in a language he or she cannot speak. Together with the new team the trainer could learn Toki Pona in a short. The same applies to expert going abroad to each very needed skills.
Sonja Lang used the Pidgin-word tok (in English talk) und the adjective from Esperanto bona (in English good) to name her new language Toki Pona “the simple language of good”. Sonja is a linguist and speaks five languages one of them is Esperanto. The reason for her to develop this new language was to overcome her depression. According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis the language affects the way we think. It helped her to work through problems because Toki Pona strips away all the complexity of our mother language. With Toki Pona she could see patterns and how things are connected in a different way. ¨Reference The Globe and Mail
Pekka Roponen in Finland central hospital of Hameenlinnan says Toki Pona focuses on the positive thought so negative thought pattern can be eliminated. Reference The Globe and Mail
Toki Pona consists of 120 words. It takes about net two hours to learn the whole vocabulary. You could learn it during a morning or afternoon. There are many Toki Pona courses on Memrise. So from whatever language background people come they probably find a course for Toki Pona on Memrise. The main Toki Pona course has currently 977 students.
Toki Pona is receiving a lot of attention just lately. A recent article in the Guardian received over 550 shares on the various social media sites.
To communicate in Toki Pona you need to follow 10 simple grammar rules.
There is also now a Toki Pona sign language.
If you want to learn the language there are several resources:
The official book by Sonja Lang: Toki Pona: The Language of Good and a pdf file.
The Memrise Courses to learn the vocabulary. They are free.
Toki Pona Lessons by jan Lope. I take the free lessons from jan Pije.
Also free Lessons on YouTube:
There is also a Toki Pona Facebook Group with 750 members and a Toki Pona Forum with approximately 15 000 posts.
Jonathan Gabel developed a visual approach to Toki Pona. He created a number of glyphs.
On Omniglot you will some useful phrases in Toki Pona.
I noticed that most of the learning material could be improved. Benny Lewis has developed an excellent process to become fluent in any language in three months. How would his methodology improve the learning and teaching of Toki Pona? Tim Ferris has also an interesting approach to analyse the difficulty of a language with 8 sentences. This is another way to get people engaged early on. Then with Kato Lomb she gives excellent advice on how to use extensive reading to learn languages. So also something to add in order to help more people to get into Toki Pona to solve their life challenges. Last but not least I wonder how fast a memory champion could learn this language. And what memo techniques can accelerate the learning. Their are many opportunities to ease the learning and motivate people based on the latest research such as gamification of learning.
What I would like to find out in the Toki Pona community is if someone had a real live examples where learning the language helped to overcame such obstacles that I had described at the beginning of my blog posts. Was Toki Pona used in AI ? https://www.cleverbot.com dose not speak Toki Pona. There is one on Github called reserbot. Try to understand if the gini at wolfram research speak Toki Pona.
How I would learn the language?
Explain the first simple concept by comparing to how many words to be fluent in English, how many words in Esperanto, what are the 1000 most frequently used words in English, compare also the list of frequent-forever.com.
Think about a language beginner with a restricted vocabulary or think about the guessing game of an object. – Concept of Toki Pona.
Let the user pick a noun from the first 5 introduced in jan Pije’s course.
Then use forever-fluent.com and introduce the pronunciation – see Forvo.com for audio on toki pona.
Also compare to the IPA – international phonetics alphabet on forvo.com and write toki pona pronounciation in IPA.
Another opportunity to practice your new language skills.
How fast could a computer learn this language ? Have a competition between a human and a AI. Add Tim Ferris How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) and Benny Lewis 12 Rules for Learning Foreign Languages in Record Time — The Only Post You’ll Ever Need and the advice of Kato Lomb
Tags: Memrise.com
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