ihr | 2009
toki pona constructed language?
anyone speak it?
just wondering...
i've considered learning it...even though it's not really useful lol...simply because i find the basic concept behind it to be interesting...
[...]
Matthew M | 2009
About 100-200 people have learned enough toki pona to write and publish something in toki pona on the web. Toki pona is unusual in that in a few days of study you can say and write many somethings (as compared to Chinese, where a similar level of competency might take 3 months of preparation). Reading is another story-- I've often noticed it is easier to write toki pona that to read it.
As for usefulness, toki pona was designed to be useful to treat depression-- there's no evidence one way or the other, but it is an innovative sort of talk-therapy. If you are in a philosophical mood, it also has some promise as a sort of meditative language that not only clears your mind, but makes it hard to clutter your mind with stuff (because initially you just won't have a suitable word for it). Eventually one becomes competent in the language and you lose out a bit on the mind clearing benefits.
Of the various conlangs with any community at all (esperanto, na'vi, Klingon, toki pona, lojban), toki pona is pretty active-- this compares with zero action going on with the vast majority of other conlangs that have been published, and as someone will probably point out, the number of users of any one conlangs is tiny compared to the number of people that have some fluency in esperanto.
Despite it being easy to get going, eventually one realizes that it a real language and fluency takes years and I don't think anyone is fluent to the extent that they could do real time translation of English or other feats that we might expect from someone who claimed to be fluent in both, say, English and Spanish.
I hope to see you on the forums!
mi wile lukin e ni: sitelin sina li lon ilo sitelen pi toki pona!
Source(s): My source is the tokipona forums, the tokipona.org website, the wikipedia article, the toki pona wikia and the google custom search engine for toki pona.
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100304224024AAKKPH1
