introduction
What is Toki Pona?
Toki Pona is a constructed language created in 2001 by French-Canadian polyglot Sonja Lang. At first a small community of fans emerged, and around 2020 the language rapidly grew in popularity. It is now the second most widely spoken conlang after Esperanto!
Toki Pona is designed with simplicity and fun in mind. Its sounds are easy to pick up. Its 130-ish words are broad in meaning, and every single one has something interesting about it. Its grammar is simple by default, and powerful when needed.
You’ll find Toki Pona in online spaces, songs, podcasts, zines, and books. The language is very versatile — with skill, you can learn to talk about anything, from weather to world news, from love to microtonality, from counting cows to investment strategy.
What is Wasona?
There are many ways to learn the language. In this course, we’ve put together ~30 short lessons. You slowly learn new words and grammar. After each lesson, you get to practice vocabulary with a little interactive game. After every ~10 lessons, we get to “zoom out” and see how people use Toki Pona for different needs: a short story, a dialogue, a song. Sometimes you’ll find a commonly asked question or interesting topic at the bottom of the lesson.
The course will not make you fluent, but it will set you up for success! After reading and practicing, you will be familiar with how the language works. You will be able to hold a conversation, read, and listen. Reading the course takes several days or weeks, but developing the intuition and speed of a proficient speaker takes months or years.
Tips to get the most out of the course:
- Pronounce every example aloud!
- When the practice game says you got something wrong, try to explain to yourself what’s different and why. There’s always an explanation above!
- Sometimes you can’t make sense of things. That’s okay! Please talk to a proficient speaker, and they’ll explain it nicely. There are always people willing to help you learn!
— kala Asi