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It’s like a jpg of language. You compress the thoughts, but then you kind of have to uncompress them in your head.

Antlers Girl is EXACTLY the type of person I expected to speak Toki Pona.

Toki Pona is the language that everyone wanted to come up with when in 4th grade.

Toki pona is like the pixel art of language

Finally, a video about Toki Pona with proper research and that isn’t filled with mistakes and misinformation about the language! Well done!

Toki Pona is absolutely a great example of how popular the conlang community has become, only behind Esperanto.

Toki Pona seems to be inherently dependent on the ability to ask clarifying questions. Good for everyday use, but not suited for a technical specification document for standardized lab procedures. It definitely has a niche, and it's a really fun perspective on what it means to communicate, and what the role of a language even is. This was very cool, thank you!

Toki Pona: A linguistic linear algebra problem in a 120 word trenchcoat.

This is utterly fascinating. Thank you Rob & thank you to the Toki Pona community for being so welcoming

You should also make a video about the Basque language (spoken in parts of Spain and France) which is one of the few isolated languages of the world (not related to any other known language). Absolutely fascinating!

Well, you started something in my family. Three weeks ago I found this video and posted it on facebook. My adult son, who is a software engineer, fell in love with the idea, so we decided to study Toki Pona together. Since then we've read, books, watched instructional video series (I just today finished the 30 part series "o pilen e toki pona,") and searched out songs. I was able to read and understand "jan Osu pi wawa nasa" (The Wizard of Oz) after only a week, but we've both found the written glyphs of sitelen pona much easier than the spoken language. I've long a long way to go with that. Anyway, thanks for starting us on this journey!

I'm in deep agreement with other tokiponists who've watched this: it's an amazing, informative, and correct video, something that's rare to see outside of the toki pona community. I especially applaud you for reaching out to people who've been involved with toki pona for a long time! I'm super excited for all the people who will watch this and who will finally see an interesting and accurate video about toki pona. Keep it up!

I really like how the language encourages speakers to attend to the immediate context (which includes both the “things” in the environment and what the other person in the conversation is thinking about). It pulls speakers closer to the present, and to each other. It’s not surprising to learn that Sonja Lang (the inventor of the language) is a linguist and translator - she knew exactly how to do the conlang thing right, and totally hit the bullseye.

7:10 "Person of earth knowledge" is how we say geologist in Turkish too! Yerbilimci, geologist, literally means "earth knowledge-er." (yer = 'ground/earth/place' bilim = science, literally 'knowledge/knowing' -ci = -er)

As a proficient speaker, I applaud you for this! It's one of the most well thought-out videos on our language I've ever seen - certainly the best one I've seen from a non-speaker. 44,000 (current view count) is a lot of people, who will be exposed to the language and will receive information without any mistakes or inaccuracies. This is great for the community. Thank you! - jan Osuka

Having played a little with Toki Pona, what I found interesting was the grammar felt like an Asian language, like Vietnamese, where it's actually really simple but logical (though Vietnamese pronouns are more complicated). The pronunciation is a lot more phonetic so it was quite easy to pronounce & clear to hear and has as few phonemes as it can & keep them distinct and I appreciate that it takes borrowings of words from around the world, so in this sense this does a good job of levelling the playing field for learners, which is an improvement of the criticisms Esperanto gets for being Eurocentric. The downside of course is that it has a limited use but not as limited as it seems, I don't see scientific journals being written in Toki Pona, but most day-to-day conversations don't need that kind of baggage. However, one reason I would kind of recommend it to language learners is that it teaches you a useful skill and that's circumlocution, which is super handy when you have a limited vocabulary and is a problem you're going to run into as a language learner. Because you may not know the right word (in the case of Toki Pona, that word doesn't exist) so you have to talk around it to be understood. Which I found useful when learning Vietnamese. I guess another is that it's a very approachable language to learn to go through the process of learning a language and understand it before you try something more complex. An option if you're intimidated by the idea of learning a language. And the Toki Pona people I've spoken to have all been super lovely and friendly and I am glad you found the same experience.

I have been learning toki pona recently. And so far I find it a deeply interesting language. There is this misconception that toki pona is a really easy language to learn, because of its small vocabulary and simple grammar. The difficulty comes from making sense of really broad words and those broad definitions acting in a different manner, depending on the function is has in the sentence. What I find so beautiful about the language is that it minimizes the amount of information conveyed. In English you can easily specify a dog, contrary to toki pona. In toki pona you can only specify the different properties of said dog. But that raises the question, when do you need to specify a dog anyway. That's right, if and only if you need to make a distinction between a certain property of a dog. That means when you convey the information of the concept of a dog in English, you superfluously convey the information of every property that a dog has, even though you only needed to make a distinction between one or two of its properties. In toki pona, you can only specify the properties of a dog, so you will always only say the properties that need to be distinguished. I hope some day to be fluent in toki pona, because I have been enamored with the way of thinking it provides. I also find extreme comfort in the community that surrounds it. jan Telan tawa!

ESKAYAN, a conlang used liturgically by a contribe in Bohol Island, Philippines could be the only conlang whose contribe were given certificate of ancestral domain claim, meaning the Philippine government recognizes them as indigenous when they are basically Visayans who use Visayan language that was heavily relexified with invented words. Eskayan also has its own script which the group claimed to be inspired by the human anatomy.

Absolutely fantastic, Rob. I love that, not only are you bringing us insight into English and other known languages, but that you also bring up something like this and Shavian, neither of which I would heard of otherwise. Thank you!

What a beautiful & interesting video! The fact that you also included Toki Pona subtitles throughout has to be one of my favorite things about it too! 😊💙 It'll help even those who are only just starting to learn the language. Amazing!

the most accurate toki pona video i've seen from an outsider to the kulupu pi toki pona pona tawa sina, jan Waputo o!

This is phenomenal video. In fact, it hits a lot of points for a script I've had in the works, including the delightful coincidence of you using the same example of fruit to explain the vagueness of Toki Pona terms! Thank you for this. I hope this brings positive attention to our community. And I hope you keep speaking Toki Pona! sina pona wawa tan pali ni. mi o lukin e pali ante sina. kin la, mi o pana e sitelen ni tawa jan sin mute! a a a.

Great video! Always a big fan of simplified Languages. Complexity is often more of a barrier than a benefit I believe. My favourite bit of this video was the "you're the language guy!" That interaction really made me smile.

This has got to be the best video on toki pona by a popular creator. It's lovely seeing community members being interviewed!!

toki a! Toki Pona speaker with 3+ years of experience here! In all my years of watching UKposts (which is nearly 3/4ths of my life now), I have pressed the like button on like 4 videos. I've been watching Rob since he did an interview with Tom Scott on him running for parliament as a pirate in 2010. Every other video on Toki Pona from an established creator so far has been full of pure misinformation and factual errors. This information is so bad that a new word, "pakola", coming from a mispelling of "pakala" in an HAI video on the topic, was coined in Toki Pona that I now often use to mean "misinform" in my Toki Pona speech. This is the first time a video from an established creator has come out on Toki Pona that I feel I can actually recommend to someone. As mentioned before, I'm not one to press the like button on UKposts videos. This is the exception. PLEASE like this video, if nothing else but to beat out the other videos full of misinformation when someone searches "Toki Pona" in the UKposts search bar. I have not been this happy watching a UKposts video in *years*.

On the one hand, I, as someone with bad memory when it comes to languages, would welcome something simple. But on the other hand, as a technically minded IT person, I prefer precise meanings of words. Ambiguity is great for pans, jokes and texts with hidden meanings, but not so much in everyday situations, or when you want to give another person detailed instructions to follow precisely or quickly warn about particular danger to avoid until it is too late. Probably there is a way to describe things in toki pona but it looks like it would take a lot of words and time.

toki a! mi jan Emalan. As a proficient toki pona speaker, this is one of the best videos about toki pona, both as an introduction to the language itself and to some of the philosophy necessary to use it. There have been many people who brush off toki pona as being incapable of conveying ideas beyond the very basic, but they never seem to learn that each word can be melded by its context and surrounding words to refer to many different things. It’s actually quite fascinating to see how toki pona speakers use the existing words in creative ways to express different concepts. One example I quite like is the use of _kon_ (typically translated as “air”) to refer to the meanings of words because it more generally refers to the idea of “essence” or “spirit,” as in “seme li kon pi nimi ni?” What does this word mean? Excellent video. I hope that this introduces a lot of new people to the language who may want to give it a try. With the right effort you can realistically learn it within weeks to days!

aaa sitelen ni li pona mute a! pilin la jan mute pi toki pona ala li alasa toki e toki pona la ona li lukin e toki musi lili li pakala lon pana sona. ona li toki ala tawa kulupu pi toki pona li alasa ala pona tawa toki pona. taso sina ni a! This video was great! It sometimes feels like people who try to make videos on toki pona see a little cutesy language and don’t really care about it enough to do well. They don’t reach out to the community and aren’t being perfectly kind to the language. But this was exactly what we were missing!

a thing I like about toki pona names is that you don’t have to modify “jan”. I’ve seen many other people in the toki pona community modify words other than “jan” as a way of expressing themselves and or as a way of making their name more representative of their personality / identity

Toki Pona might arguably be the world’s cutest language. ❤

Rob, such an amazing video!! It's truly wonderful how respectful and genuinely interested you approach all this!!!

This is fascinating! Probably one of my favorite videos you’ve made!

One thing that i realized about Toki Pona is that the word "ona" used for he/she/it is exactly to him/to her/to it in Turkish. Yes, in Turkish, there is a single third-person/object pronoun. The pronunciation of vowels also match that in Turkish. Thirdly, Turkish also has some rulesets to make a word. One example is that words cannot have doubled consonants. If you see one (e.g., millet = nation), it is an indicator that the word is borrowed from another language, usually Arabic. No word can start with back-to-back consonants. If you see one, the word is again borrowed (e.g., tren = train). No two vowels (same or different) can appear back-to-back. These sets of rules are what give Turkish its sound harmony. It seemed interesting that some of these ideas are also used in the creation of the simplest language. After all, consistent rules and regulations bring simplicity.

My name would probably be something like jan Musi because my actual name Isaac in hebrew is roughly "one who laughs/rejoices" and musi means like fun/amusing

Such a FUN thought and language experiment!!! I love curious and creative minds.

Back in fifth or sixth grade my best friend and I made a conlang so we could pass notes back and forth without anyone but us two be able to decrypt the message. It was based on the Phoenician alphabet. Good times.

Wow. Congratulations, you did a lot of research and gave a fair description of our beloved language! And yes, everybody should absolutely check out jan Usawi's music even if they have no interest in the language! sina pali pona a. olin en pona tawa sina. mi wile e ni: jan mute li lukin e ni, li kute e kalama musi pi jan Usawi, li kama sona e toki pona, li kama lon ma pona pi toki pona...

It's interesting to note that _geologist_ almost literally means _person with Earth knowledge_ - just not very transparently to most modern speakers. So in this case, Toki Pona becomes a clarifier as well as a simplifier.

You are absolutely my favorite channel right now. Theres plenty of people that have the information but you're one of the few that can get it across in such an enjoyable and retainable way.

Dear Rob, I just came across to your videos a couple of weeks ago and I am binging since. Many thanks

Interesting video. At first I was thinking this is like Orwell's Newspeak, where words are eliminated from the language to make it simpler and smaller and less expressive. Then I thought, it's exactly the opposite. Instead of starting with a very rich language and "simplifying" it, you are starting with nothing and deciding on what the absolute essentials are. Of course if this develops over time you will end up with hundreds of thousands of words as you decide that more and more ideas are required to have accurate communications.

Brilliant! Such a fun and creative linguistic and mental exercise. I also like how kind and welcoming the speakers are. ❤

EYY been watching you for maybe a year now and im glad to see that youre making a video abt my favourite language :D

I quickly checked to see if this was posted on April 1st... then I saw the representation of "299" - which took more words than this entire post! Good luck kiddos.

This reminds me A LOT of American Sign Language. A "student" is a "learn-person," or "learning-person." Table and Desk are signed the exact same way, and clarification can be contextual or based on other signs in the sentence (small, round, metal, etc). We run into a lot of issues with technical/scientific vocabulary this way, but for the people who use it -- it serves its function.

toki a! Fantastic! You have explained Toki Pona brilliantly! I do sweet & cozy vlogs in easy spoken Toki Pona (travel, impromptu, etc. ... with subtitles for those who are learning this beautiful language). Toki Pona is such a fantastic mean of self-expression, so good for artistic endeavors, for deep thinking about the real meanings of words, for the applied study of linguistics, for playful introspection, or even for community building. Rob, you have made a brilliant introduction here, well done! Keep it up and enjoy this beautiful language! 💕

so happy there's a video on toki pona dont speak it, but have known it existing for a while, this video has set the motivation to start learning.

This was SO interesting! I loved it. Thank u.

I imagine that the first human languages were something like this. Probably started out as specific vocalizations and since humans are naturally curious and experimental, they probably started messing around with different sound combinations and over time gathered a collection of simple words that have been expanding in number and complexity ever since. I wonder how many different words have ever existed in all the languages that have ever existed? There must be at least a billion.

While it's definitely not my thing, this was fascinating and intriguing to learn about. Ingenious usage of language. I wish all toki pona speakers the best.

I've been watching your videos on and off for a while, when they pop up in my feed. This one convinced me to subscribe. I think I am jan Hesi

This video was a real treat! I only recently became aware of your linguistic videos, which are excellent, and toki pona is near and dear to my heart! toki pona is often misrepresented in videos, so it's lovely to see you really hit the mark here. Seeing other speakers give their thoughts is also very nice. You nailed the pronunciation btw! toki pona la, sitelen tawa sina li pona nanpa wan tawa mi! pona o tawa sina!

I've been learning toki pona for a couple years, & out of all the videos made by non tokiponists on it, this is by far the best. It's clear you've done plenty of research, thank you for that.

"Why use lot word when few word do trick!" I bet Kevin Malone would've been proud had he learned about this language 😅 This is a fascinating subject. I only wonder what would a community experience the world around it if it had only a similarly tiny language.

This is the quirkiest channel I've ever seen, and I love it!

Fascinating!! I thoroughly enjoyed learning about this!

And here I thought most people had a problem with English not being descriptive enough to prevent confusion

Thank you Rob, I'm interested in languages and conlangs but always dismissed Toki Pona as a gimmicky experiment or as lacking the seriousness of a full language. Your explanation and showcasing the speakers opened my eyes to a potentially new linguistic study I might never have allowed myself the pleasure of experiencing. Thanks for the great content.

Stumbled upon your channel just the other day and I find this video fascinating! Conlangs are amazing because they make us analyze our own languages and therefore ways of thinking. I’d never heard of Toki Pona- it’s a neat idea.

I just spent 2 hours going does it need a word for...? Nope.

I have been genuinely excited to see you talk about this language… I knew it was coming!

I don't talk a lot. When I do, I use every word I feel is necessary to clearly and precisely communicate my meaning. At first, I felt a little put off by the vaguery of Toki Pona. But now I'm thinking it would be interesting to learn and exercise the more interpretive side of my brain. Thanks for the vid Rob! You always find the coolest stuff! ❤

I really enjoy all your videos, but this was particularly rivetting! What fun :) MU!

What a great video. Glad to find you. Subscribed.

Toki Pona speakers, assemble! Big names covering the language means new speakers that will need our help!

Watched 1 minute so far, jan Usawi is awesome

jan Ana 🙋🏻‍♀️ The thing is even in very precise languages like German it is still up to the reader/listener to interpret the information given in a sentence. That interpretation depends on experience and knowledge. You can very precisely describe the details of a tree to a person who was born without eyes, or even a newly discovered species to other zoologists, and every person will interpret the words based on their individual knowledge. Therefore, a lot of the words we use are superfluous because the interpretation will always differ in the mind of the reader/listener, while the gist of it is the point we agree on. Hence, Toki Pona is actually more efficient.

o pona tawa sina a! Great video, your presentation of the language is thorough and thoughtful, and I and the rest of the toki pona speaking community are extremely grateful!- jan Nitela

The words you mention immediately rang my bells, they sound so similar to the finnish words with the same/similar meaning: sina - sinä = you kiwen - kivi = rock kasi - kasvi = plant wawa - vahva = strong lipu - lippu = flag ma - maa = country/earth/ground in addition the rules of the langauge sound also pretty similar in a way that makes it almost finnishlike to read in a

Thank you so much for making this video! It's extremely refreshing to see such a well researched, up-to-date, and beautifully concise introduction to the language! The Toki Pona community thanks you!! sina pona mute tan pali suli sina a! pona o tawa sina tan jan Sa!

This is exactly how we use a limited vocabulary to express complex ideas in Zambian Sign Language. I don't know how many unique words the language has, but I certainly know fewer than a thousand. And I communicate just fine, including 30-minute public talks.

Thank you for spreading knowledge 😁

As a Finn, I'm intrigued by relatively many Finnish words in Toki Pona. For example: nimi = nimi (name), sina = sinä (you), kala = kala (fish), nena = nenä (nose), sama = sama (same)

I love the complexity of my native language and love playing with meaning. I also love toki pona and delved into Esperanto. I don't want to compare and judge - I simply enjoy it all!

Small correction. In the South USA, Y'all is not plural. The plural of y'all is ALL Y'ALL. iykyk

I've been at toki pona for just over a week now. The really cool part is how quickly one can develop a sub-fluency

Hi Rob, you previously did a video on “lost positives”, but what about “lost nouns”? For example, you can be “happy” or “cosy” but we don’t say “I have a lot of hap” or “this jumper has plenty of cose”. Did we ever use those words? I’m sure there are lots of other examples.

This language is so cute. I want to learn it with my German friend.

OMG AS A FLUENT TOKI PONA SPEAKER THIS VIDEO IS AMAZING!! its not uncommon for people to make these really cheap unresearched videos about toki pona and it really hurts the community but it seems like that trend is mostly ending now. its so nice to see a video like this. this actually does a good job at describing toki pona and how it works and its just honestly a good video in general. i was so excited when i saw jan Usawi and even more when i saw jan Lakuse!! thank you so much for actually doing research and speaking to toki pona speakers

You did a great job covering the critical distinction between ambiguous and vague. It's one of the reasons why the counting system you described is my least favorite part of toki pona - it adds (needless IMO) ambiguity.

sitelen tawa ni li pona mute mute tawa mi! definitely the best coverage on the language by far - unlike the mistake-riddled slop that Half As Interesting made.

Very surprised by the lack of Jan Misali in this video!

I immediately knew which language you meant just from seeing the title and smily symbol in the thumbnail 😊

Just spent ten minutes scrolling through the comments, and it seems to me that the introduction of this minimalist conlang is quite a litmus test of people's imaginations. If an expansive language is a feast for expression, then a minimalist language is an experimental, imaginative leap into another form of expressionism. To those threatened by others using less precise language, let me be precise: minds express themselves better when open.

And I was wondering if there's a number system worse than that of French 😂

13:40 - "Rob, I think, would be closer to the toki pona 'a' than to 'o' " - only if you are American. As a Brit, you may want to tokiponise your name to reflect how you pronounce it, although ultimately what you choose is up to you. We have had a long standing debate about what we would call London. From the earliest days of toki pona "ma tomo Lanten" has been used, but some people feel that something like "ma tomo Lontan" would be closer to what Londoners would say.

I switched to Opera years ago. What I love about it is how easily and intuitively one can begin using it's many features. After years using Chrome forever I still find myself browsing instructions for how it works. I never have had that problem with Opera. As for Toki Pona, it's not for me. I tend not to use 120 words when 2468 will do 😂

I love the back to basics idea of language. More words can add specificity, but that can broadly be done in two ways: with more vocabulary; or, with more a longer string of words (through modifiers, a relative clause or whatever means a language can use to indicate more specificity). Unfortunately, I don't have the time to watch this entire video before work. I'll definitely return to watch the rest because it's so interesting.

Super interesting! Never heard of this conlang before, bit I'll look more inyo it for sure! Please do more conlangs!

❤❤❤ I loved everything about this language! And it sounds so happy

This is absolutely fascinating!

This is a good way to describe toki pona. The name I chose was "jan Tesin" and I live in "ma itali"

What an interesting language! I'll be trying it out after this. The translation and compression of ideas sounds like a creative exercise in itself. Also, for those with Kindle Unlimited, the "Language of Good" book is free to read through that.

Fun. and informative as usual! I love how respectful you are of your guests. Something that struck me....I wonder how this compares to the Hawaiian language, not that I would know anything about it, but there's something fun and soothing in Toki Pona that reminds me of what little I've ever heard of Hawaiian. Keep up the great videos!

“Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?” - Kevin Malone, The Office

As a toki pona speaker, thank you for making a video about it! Mute pona!

Toki Pona is amazing. I love how it's constructed and pronounced as simply as possible, while not being confusing or sounding stupid. I'm thinking of learning it myself.

That was the best 😊. Love the simplicity ❤.

dah-kah oo-nye noo-lah, ee-day ee-kah-noh-bah-ay-ay wah! (Thank you my friend, great video!) - Looks kind of similar, to Toki Pona, right? When I was in high school back in Switzerland around ~1998 my friend and I were fascinated by Furbish, the Furby language. Mind you neither of us owned or ever even saw a real Furby - we were ~15yo at the time and really were not the target market - we just discovered this fascinating minimalist language, and started communicating in it, extending it when necessary and building words in a similar way to Toki Pona by using the closest concept with a bunch of modifiers. If Toki Pona had been around at the time I think we would have become fluent speakers. :D