Matthew M | 2010
1) Hard to say. Most people who are enthusiastic about toki pona are learning it as their fourth language (typically mother tongue, school, esperanto, then toki pona, sometimes more) It took me two episodes of about 3-4 months each to get to the point where I could read at a reasonable speed and write intelligible, if not grammatically perfect toki pona. It starts out incredibly easy and then after a certain amount of time, you realize certain phrases are really hard to translate without careful thought and research.
2) There is no one to speak with locally. I'm trying to organize an in person meetup in Arlington, Virginia. The closest one gets to conversational toki pona is the IRC chat room, which some people like a lot, but I tend to avoid-- I just don't like IRC. I have grandiose plans of setting up a skype multi-person call in, but so far the planets haven't lined up right for it to happen.
3) The main communities are: the tp forum, the remnants of the tp community on livejournal, a few people on twitter and tokilili.shoutem.com, a couple of independent blogs, a very small group of people on youtube, and possibly a new community on tokipona.shapad.com. Some toki pona users appear in all of these places, some only in one or two. Wikipedia and wikia used to be active with toki pona stuff, but now they are both pretty quiet.
4) There are 125 root words, but one of them--pu--is more akin to a reserved word because it hasn't be defined. There are 100s of proper modifiers, which generally require memorization, such as ma Mewika = USA and ma Losi = Russia. As you can see the proper modifiers often look little like the proper name they draw upon. The number of set phrases one needs to become familiar with is probably in the 3000 range. By set phrases, I mean things like "jan pona", which means "friend", but also "good person". The set phrases are the equivalent to compound words in English, which only sometimes can be understood completely just by looking at the parts.
5) toki pona's users have found many uses for it. For me it is a nice small language that allows me to discover interesting things about how foreign languages work, how my own language works, but without the 2-10 years it takes to become competent or fluent in even the simplest of the natural languages.
Source(s): - The wikipedia article - The tokipona.org wiki and forum - The toki pona corpus (that is the sum total of everything ever written in toki pona)
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100904165602AAiZwaX
