I am interested in learning Toki Pona. As a speaker of Toki Pona and English, what would be a good learning path for someone that speaks primarily English and has a moderate amount of knowledge about linguistics? Are there specific methods that are particularly useful for learning Toki Pona as an English speaker?
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2Cross-site relevant: What resources are there for learning Toki Pona? A Google search also comes up with a number of possibilities.Jeff Zeitlin– Jeff Zeitlin2022-06-08 11:38:13 +00:00Commented Jun 8, 2022 at 11:38
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4 Answers
(Posting a separate answer so it can be voted up or down separately.)
If you prefer a book rather than a lesson series, there are the classic lipu pu ("Toki Pona: the Language of Good") and lipu ku ("The Toki Pona Dictionary") by Sonja Lang. These are the original authoritative references on the language.
There's also an unofficial book by B. J. Knight, which has the advantage of being free.
I used /dev/urandom's course, which is structured as a series of 13 lessons. Each lesson introduces 10 new words, some aspect of the grammar, and concludes with a series of English-to-tp and tp-to-English exercises using the words that have been introduced so far.
As it happens, 10 new words is also Anki's suggestion for how many new things to introduce per day. Each day I put the lesson's 10 words into flash cards (using the "basic with reversed card" type so it'll quiz me on both tp-to-English and English-to-tp translation) and then used Anki to learn and review them.
I'm told the 12 days of sona pi toki pona course uses the same structure, though it's not the one I used myself. The o kama sona e toki pona course was similar, but has been deprecated by the creator; an old version can be downloaded from that link, but be warned, it's remarkably difficult to use on modern browsers (and also the author no longer recommends using it).
Chatting with other toki pona users! It helps you learn much faster than many courses. Just learn the basics (this cheatsheet is a good resource), then find a community of toki pona speakers! Personally, I recommend kama sona ("to study"), as it's very welcoming to new learners.
I would recommend Wasona — easily the best course out there, but I may be biased.
Wasona is made very recently and hence is very up to date. It also includes (minimally) interactive practice questions. It has translations into a variety of languages, and more undergoing development.
(I may be biased since I learned toki pona through Wasona, but I think that's also anecdotal evidence. I also am working on the Mandarin translation of Wasona.)
o kama sona e toki pona!
