Compilation of artwork of [email protected] and karderio.
Toki Pona, a constructed language consisting only of 100-150 words, is something that sounds fairly easy to be learned, doesn't it?
Usually, when I want to learn a language, I try finding 2-3 native speakers online, to just speak with them naturally. But usually I had a starting point for this, as I for example had some years of Spanish in school before or I studied loads of French vocab at home, before diving into finding my first conversation partners.
ChatGPT though, gives a totally new possibility: You can start slow, you can let ChatGPT do the basic vocab teaching for you, ChatGPT is always willing to talk to you and help out in your native language when you're stuck.
Now, I have a few thoughts: When I'm talking to ChatGPT in German (my native language), it tends to just randomly put an English word in the middle of the text. Will ChatGPT forget translating when I talk with it in Toki Pona?
ChatGPT tends to hallucinate a lot. Whenever you go into more niche topics, it makes up things left and right. This probably isn't a big deal when you are trying to learn major languages like French, Spanish, Russian, German with it. But when trying to talk in a constructed language with a user-base of only a handful of people and very little content online, will it make up new words of the language randomly? I think the fear of me when using ChatGPT isn't really that it will randomly put english words into Toki Pona text. That should be quite obvious when it happens. The bigger trouble would probably be if ChatGPT suddenly makes up words, that look like they exist but they really don't. But that is something I will just need to find out.
So my goal now is to invest some 30 minutes or so every day into conversing with ChatGPT, maybe looking at a dictionary online every now and again to check if the words I got taught actually exist, and then every week or so, I will let you know about my progress in learning the language. Since it only has less than 200 canonical words, I doubt it should take more than a few weeks to speak. Concepts will be hard to learn, especially because Toki Pona forces you to break down concepts to such simple words, to express it with those few words. But it should be possible.
Once I feel confident enough, my goal is to write a full post here on Hive solely in Toki Pona. Probably it would make sense to set a time, for when this will be. A year would probably be a good deadline for traditional languages. But since Toki Pona seems like something totally incomparable to "traditional languages", I wouldn't really know, how far into the future to put the deadline.
Actually, I've wanted to study this language before, but I never made it beyond a single YouTube video. And from this, I still remember some concepts. Toki Pona for example means something like "good language". Toki (stemming from English "talk") has to do with speaking, language and so on, while pona is a word that just refers to anything positive ("good", "easy", "tasty")
And one further note: This idea is something, that came to mind a few days ago. But I didn't really follow this idea. Now, I just saw the new post of @azircon where they commit to learning Japanese - but a more traditional way, I suppose. So I thought, that if they publicly commit to learning a language, maybe I should too! So, I wish them good luck. And possibly, after some time, we both report about our experience, to let others know, what ways of learning what languages from what starting points work best.
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