Welcome to day 1 of [x ~ 12] our collaborative effort to learn Toki Pona! For those not in the know, Toki Pona is a constructed, minimalist language designed to be cute, fun, and very easy to learn. It was created about twenty years ago by Sonja Lang (jan Sonja), who remains active in the community. By her stated intent, Toki Pona belongs to its speakers, not her, and be engaging in learning we become a part of the broader, and rapidly growing, Toki Pona community.

We are going to have daily posts for the next two weeks-ish to work together on our Toki Pona skills. I'm a trained language teacher, so I'm going to be putting my skills to use to put together lessons each day to complement the resources we'll be using. As we progress, these lessons will get appropriately more complicated and we will start to work on communicating with each other.

I am not an experienced Toki Pona speaker; I have a whole 2 days of practice from this past weekend, so I'm barely ahead of anyone starting fresh. For the most part, I'm constructing these lessons to teach myself as much as any other participants.

We will be using two primary resources:

• jan Misali's son pi toki pona youtube playlist
• jan Elisa's Toki Pona in 76 illustrated lessons (also available in Spanish)

Personally, I am also using this set of flash cards on anki to help develop my vocabulary, though I won't be incorporating that into the lessons.

All of this is drawing on the fundamental source of the language: the book Toki Pona: The Language of Good by Sonja Lang. You aren't required to buy the book, but it would certainly help!

With all that out of the way, let's get started!

Video: Reading and Whatnot

Illustrated Lessons:

• 0. pronunciation
• 1. first words
• 2. simple sentences
• 3. second part of simple sentences
• 4. direct object
• 5. more words

Based on the above video and written lessons, complete the assignments below and post your answers in the comments. (if you see any errors, please point them out; I'm still learning too!).

Translate (one possible correct translation is included in spoilers, but other translations could be equally valid):

Finally, I want to direct everyone to the very active and good vibes Toki Pona discord . The politics are good, jan Sonja is on there regularly, and everyone is very friendly and supportive. It's a great place to practice, and when we need to get some speaking practice in, we'll do it there.

p.s.: If you are hearing impaired, nonverbal, or otherwise interested, there is an official but barebones sign language version of Toki Pona and several community projects to improve upon, which you can learn about in the luka-pona channel in the discord server.

tenpo suna nanpa tu

tenpo suna nanpa tu wan