So, it’s been two months since I’ve started to learn Toki Pona. I still haven’t finished reading the Pu (pu? the pu? Pu?) but as before, I’m also studying other courses. In my opinion, the more interesting is Urandom’s. It’s clearly structured, provides a lot of examples, and offers interesting perspectives on several dialectal subtleties. While respecting the official grammar, it also surprised me with a few ways of structuring sentences I didn’t know were possible, yet seem totally legit. I think it’s a great companion to the Pu, as it both expands and challenges some of the official material.
I’m trying to practice various exercises every day. Anki is starting to show its limits: it’s great for vocabulary and basic grammar, but when you start using decks that don’t strictly follow official content, you can stumble upon odd or outdated definitions, or way too many definitions for a single word, or idioms for saying very specific things you don’t care about… So I’m hesitating between making my own decks with strict Pu and existing courses references, or making my own app. In both cases, it will take some time.
Beside this, regarding my progress:
- I know all the official vocabulary, even if I probably still miss a few meanings for a given word from time to time.
- I understand what I read, but depending on how familiar I am with the sentence’s structure, it may take a few seconds or a few minutes to parse.
- I also know all the glyphs, though they take me more time to read, and I still sometimes mistake some for others.
- I’ve started to write spontaneously short texts in Toki Pona. Mainly poems/songs, and nothing worth showing for now, but it’s nice to feel this need nonetheless.
- I’ve also, in a way, started to have thoughts in Toki Pona, hence the short texts. It’s strange and wonderful, and not very common yet, but it happens.
- I’ve resumed the development of Opuscule (an experimental text editor and mini website generator) and I’m currently implementing a Toki Pona HTML export that includes glyphs.
- I’m thinking about releasing an upcoming album in Toki Pona. Mainly titles and a few vocal samples, but it would be a lot of fun to explore.
I’d say I’m making slow but steady progress, the main issue being that I have bazillions parallel projects going on, so I can’t spend as much time as I’d like on Toki Pona. But it makes me happy nonetheless.
toki pona li musi mute a! toki ni li pona tawa mi.
