toki pona

toki pona is a philosophically minimalist constructed language, created by Sonja Lang. Versions of it first appeared on line in 2001, and a small but dedicated community of speakers developed around it in the 2000’s, mostly around a handful of resources that were linked from her website. In 2009, Sonja began to develop a formal lesson plan, which was published in 2014. Many others have written better than I could about the language, it’s history and use, so I will not attempt to repeat their work here.

This page is where I keep a list of up-to-date resources for others looking to learn.

resources

learning courses

If you know you want to learn toki pona, Toki Pona The Language of Good, the official toki pona book, is a must own. The examples are simple, easy to understand, and used as a standard to judge all other resources by.

There are a number of lessons on line as well, each with it’s own advantages.

jan Lentan’s toki pona page are my new favorite set of on line lessons. One great thing about them is that they compare multiple approaches using toki pona, and lay out the many meanings for each sentence rather than giving one empirical translation. This ends up giving a solid foundation for the different ways people prefer to interpret the grammar. This could also make it harder to learn toki pona if you are new to it, depending on your learning style. The additional resources alone are another reason to visit the site.

Once the authoritative source for learning toki pona, jan Pije’s lessons were removed from his site in 2020. They are still one of the most in depth courses, with more examples than you might find elsewhere, but they also contain a number of examples of uses no longer as popular as they once were. There is an archived copy here and I will still reference them in the lessons, but I think they will probably become more obscure over time.

videos

jan Misali 12 days of learning toki pona. I don’t know that I could learn a language well from video lessons, but I know others do and these videos have been a hit for a lot of people. Already knowing toki pona, I find them very easy to watch.

toki kala -tawa pona, toki kala - jan pali, and toki kala - nasin pona. There are only three videos here, but they are a goldmine if you are looking to hear toki pona, and a lot of it, spoken well.

dictionaries

As each word in toki pona can have more than one definition, all of the meanings that a word might be used for can vary from dictionary to dictionary. For this reason I like to have several old and new versions on hand:

  • jProgr - beautiful interactive dictionary
  • jan Inwin - the most thorough list of historical and unofficial words, includes the standards
  • nimi pi toki pona - a little hard to navigate, but a lot of good context and examples
  • jan Lope - interactive, includes phrases and examples, a little hard to read
  • tokipona.net - original definitions, more thorough than many more recent

groups, chats, boards

Other toki pona writing systems

Here is dated but comprehensive look at other pre-pu hieroglyphic and experimental writing systems that have been tried out with toki pona through the years.

grammar