lipu sona

Welcome to toki pona!

toki pona is a language created by Sonja Lang, first published in 2001, designed to simplify ideas to their basic elements.

toki pona is designed to be easy to use and learn; people have been said to learn the whole language in a matter of days and converse freely in only a few weeks. toki pona has only around 120-130 words (depending on how you count). The grammar is very simple, and the sounds have been selected to be common across languages and difficult to confuse.

However, toki pona has its limitations. It’s very difficult (though possible) to talk about scientific concepts or translate jargon-heavy text. Because words have such a wide range of semantic meanings, there is ambiguity; some sentences can be interpreted as two completely opposite meanings.

toki pona is highly dependent on context. There are no fixed phrases for things or concepts, meaning that depending on perspective, the same thing or idea may be described many different ways by different people. Even the grammar is flexible. Words cover a wide range of meanings; for example, there is one word that covers fruit, berry, and apple; one word for want and need; one word for strong and powerful.

Differences in this course

This course teaches the language as used by the community. Its writing takes into account constant community feedback. It teaches new and old commonly used words that weren’t included in Sonja Lang’s book. Instead of being prescriptive, I try to be descriptive.

Grammar is explained in a different way than in most courses; the explanation aligns more with most common analyses of toki pona grammar.

Conventions

At the top of every lesson, teal cards contain a brief summary of what’s discussed below.

A purple card contains an example or a translation:

toki ni li tawa pana sona taso.
This sentence is only a teaching aid.

Text in italics is usually either a term that’s being emphasized, or a word in toki pona. Text in “quotes” is usually an English word.

At the bottom of lessons, red cards contain definitions of words, usually taken from Sonja Lang’s book.

Other resources and courses

I learned toki pona using the book Toki Pona: The Language of Good by Sonja Lang. The course in this book is very well written, and I recommend it to anyone looking to learn the language or support jan Sonja. Some of the language usage in the book differs from this course. I used it as a resource for writing this course.

jan Misali made a twelve-day video course. I haven’t used this resource, but I’ve heard good things about it from other members of the community.

jan Lentan (/dev/urandom) wrote a course called lipu sona pona. It takes into account the way different people speak toki pona and covers dialectal differences. It’s one of the best courses out there and I recommend checking it out. I used it as a resource for writing this course.

Sonja Lang made a Memrise deck for learning essential toki pona vocabulary. It’s a great resource for memorizing words. However, it doesn’t have some of the words in this course that were not in Sonja’s book.

jan Sasi made a dictionary that’s based on community polls of words by Sonja Lang. Instead of just listing word definitions, this dictionary shows how they’re translated by the community. It’s a very useful resource.

I made a Discord bot called qbot. Along other features, it includes toki pona dictionary lookup commands and a generator for the logographic script sitelen pona.