Wasting time (according to my wife) learning about a language practically nobody else speaks, Toki Pona. It consists of about 120 words and sounds fun. This is better than doing *sudoku* but I agree, learning Arabic or Japanese might be more useful. Oh well, we can’t do useful things all the time.
Learn more: Toki Pona in 76 lessons. CC BY 2.5, very cool!
Check out pages 51 & 52 of 53, my guess is that this is all the cheat sheet you need.
«mi musi e kama sona e toki pona» This is going to ruin my iPhone dictionary.
There is of course also the book and website by the author herself. «Toki Pona is a human language I invented in 2001. It was my attempt to understand the meaning of life in 120 words.»
Toki Seme is a toki pona to English translator.
How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language. «The result, according to Lang, is to immerse the speaker in the moment, in a state reminiscent of what Zen Buddhists call mindfulness. “What is a car?” Lang mused recently via phone from her home in Toronto. “You might say that a car is a space that’s used for movement,” she proposed. “That would be tomo tawa. If you’re struck by a car though, it might be a hard object that’s hitting me. That’s kiwen utala.”»
How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language
Toki Pona, a Not Entirely Useful Language: «Thusly, while I think that the idea behind Toki Pona is grand (or swell, or great, or just average), I don’t think that it is a useful language for those that enjoy expression and words. It provides an interesting insight, a positive one at that, and through that accomplishes what it set out to do.»
Toki Pona, a Not Entirely Useful Language
Linja Pona is a font that allows you to type *toki pona* and it will automatically render into the appropriate hieroglyphs. There are some nice pictures on Imgur. Jan-Same says: «As you can see, I implemented compound glyphs, a key feature of the hieroglyphs. […] You can download the font here and use it as you want.» Download the font from Google Drive (or from this site).
Sitelen Sitelen. «The sitelen sitelen project is a non-linear hieroglyphic writing system with the toki pona language at its base.» Lesson 2 has some good pictures to get you started.
Sitelen Sitelen Renderer allows you to type a sentence into a text field and will generate the non-linear hieroglyphs for you. The sources are available on GitHub.
Toki Pona - Lessons in English is another free PDF. LaTeX and GitHub, for the programmers in our midst. It is based on o kama sona e toki pona! by Bryant Knight (a.k.a. jan Pije).
Toki Pona - Lessons in English
Explore #tokipona on my Mastodon instance.
#Language
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Not sure it’s entirely useless... There are probably now more Tokiponists than there are Idist or Interlingua-speakers.
Ok, Klingon and Esperanto level audiences are still quite far off, but Toki Pona is certainly making it’s way up the artificial language scale.
Learning a language in a weekend with which you can communicate with people doing this same effort worldwide, it’s quite fun and audacious.
I’m adding a few words to Toki Pona, especially three bigger multipliable numbers [”luka en noka” = 20, “kento’ = 100 and “mila” = 1000), plus kilo, meta, lita en sekonto, minuta en sa < Swahili saa ’hour’) to make it possible to obtain a SIL language code and get back a Wikipedia in it).
– jansegers 2018-01-22 16:49 UTC
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I still wonder what a good way to learn the language would be. Did you use index cards and a Leitner System?
– Alex 2018-01-22 20:02 UTC
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Yesterday I decided to start a Toki Pona journal.
– Alex 2018-01-23 06:45 UTC
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An inspiration for a translation project: take the text of Brahms’ German Requiem. Some more notes here.
– Alex Schroeder 2018-01-23 13:40 UTC
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– Alex Schroeder 2018-01-25 15:45 UTC
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mi kama ni tan ilo pi moku pona. mi toki e: ni li toki pona, anu seme? li! ni li epiku. mi olin e kama e toki pona lon ma ante.
lipu sina pi toki pona li sona pona. ken la mi pali e ona.
– jan Tise 2022-06-13 15:23 UTC
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pona! 😀
– Alex 2022-06-14 05:27 UTC
