Goyavoyage's den

toki pona learning resources (learn an entire new language in a week!)

toki pona is a constructed language made by Canadian linguist Sonja Lang. I had been vaguely aware of its existence for years, but one year ago exactly on this day(!), I finally took the plunge1.

It's an incredibly simple language made of around 130 words2 that is a joy to use and to play with. Most of the structure of toki pona can be learnt in less than 20 minutes (Section I below); and you can acquire its entire vocabulary and subtleties in maybe a week of small lessons (Sections II and III below). Really.
(the other sections are just me getting more and more unhinged about that language; you may be interested in reading all that as your toki pona knowledge grows!)

toki pona is both really easy to understand and extremely context-dependent due to its small vocabulary. It reignited in me a love for linguistics that was dormant, and it's just been so much fun. By design, it makes you break any complicated concept into simpler ones, and so you have to understand what you're talking about to talk about anything, and to focus on what is meaningful to convey.
It gave me so much happiness throughout this first year of reading and writing with it here or there that I wanted to write at least this masterpost about it to celebrate, and to give you the learning resources that helped me get into it.

Don't get overwhelmed by the multiple sections here: you can go step by step.

I - The basics

I can't recommend the following 18-minute video by ilo Tani enough, before you read anything else here. It's catchy, simple, it covers everything very clearly, and it just gives you an immediate overview of toki pona as a whole. I started there, and I still regard it as the one most efficient way to get into toki pona.

To help you remember stuff more efficiently, or maybe if you're really not ready to sit for a quarter an hour through a video, I also recommend this "cheat sheet" (originally by blinry, updated by jan Sa). It's just one sheet of paper, with the front containing the entire grammar and the back the entire vocabulary2 of toki pona. Yes, this entire language fits on a piece of paper.
It's been really helpful, early on, to quickly check back some vocabulary or rule when I was reading something. It won't give you more than a summarized quick peek at toki pona, though, and may not be the best resource to actually start with.

II - Building from there

There are a number of toki pona lessons; you can actually find so many different learning resources on the encyclopedia sona pona - and some may fit you better than what I give you here.

But still. My personal recommendation, by far, is this website by soweli Sika. It's divided into 20 small lessons that are really well done, with a slow introduction of the entire toki pona vocabulary, and short exercises with answers available with a click. It is, I think, the most reliable source for building up your toki pona, if you give yourself enough time to actually do the exercises. It can really give you some solid knowledge of the entire language in a week!

That website also introduces you to sitelen pona, the alternate glyph system used to write toki pona words, with each word a very simple, often self-descriptive glyph. I've been absolutely fascinated by that glyph system, which makes you able to read small and big stories only filled with little symbols.

III - Other important starting resources

Here are a few other resources that may be really useful as you start learning toki pona.

Two big reliable databases of most currently used toki pona words exist, and are somewhat similar:

I also recommend occasionally checking the etymologies of words as you learn them, if you struggle with remembering some of them. Chances are, you know one or two languages some of these words are taken from, and this will increase your ability to memorize them quickly (see for instance: ken for can, possibility, capacity; wile for will, want, need; the numbers wan and tu; etc).

Along with this, I recommend this sitelen pona cheat sheet if you try to learn the glyph system and forget what a glyph means at any given point.

Finally, if you really are into grammar and want deeper linguistic details on some precise use, this extremely meticulous grammar guide by kili pan Juli may make you happy. It's more technical than other resources, but some people like technicalities. It's been helpful to me recently as some kind of style guide.

IV - I've started learning; where to go next?

Once you start getting a grasp on toki pona as a language, and maybe even sitelen pona as a glyph system, you probably want to practice reading/writing toki pona in the wild. Talking and understanding spoken toki pona is a clearly more difficult goal, so it is postponed to later sections. Let's stick to reading/writing for now.

The best piece of advice here is of course to find a toki pona community wherever you are, notably if you have any kind of social media, so that you can read other people, and maybe interact.
Also, the largest toki pona community is probably the ma pona pi toki pona Discord server, on which I haven't been, but that you can join with this invite link. You may find other communities by browsing the official toki pona website.

But maybe you don't want to interact. Which is definitely ok! I've been mostly reading and lurking myself, so I completely understand. So you may want to just find things to read.

(Also, you may want to try and take concepts or sentences yourself and think on how to tokiponize them, on your own. Sometimes I just do that for fun, and it's already incredibly formative! Though having some sort of feedback from other toki pona speakers, if only through osmosis and immersion, is always valuable. So, reading.)

V - Things to read!

My main piece of advice to practice is to read toki pona. This is the best way to get used to a variety of ways of transcribing ideas - of breaking them down into smaller pieces.

The main place where I found most of what I read in toki pona is the toki pona encyclopedia sona pona, which contains a (non-exhaustive) list of written works in toki pona, either original or translated. Some of my personal recommendations3:

VI - Naming yourself

Once you've immersed yourself into toki pona, you may want to consider creating your own toki pona name. Everything is broken down into detailed steps (and everything you need!) in this wonderful guide by the Packbats.

Basically5:

Also, the last important element, and one of my absolute favorite features of toki pona, is the notion of headnoun. I'll explain a tiny bit more here because I just like this concept so much.

In toki pona, any word that is not a meaningful toki pona word must be Capitalized and appended to a toki pona concept as a complement, so that we know what concept we're talking about in the first place. "jan Kanata", for instance, is a human ("jan") whose name is something along the lines of "Kanata"; meanwhile, "ma Kanata" is probably the tokiponization of the country Canada - but you need to say that we're talking about a place, hence the "ma". This pre-word, or string of pre-words, is fundamental to get your topic across, and is the headnoun.

This is why a lot of toki pona speakers' names seem to start with jan: it's to give the extra precision that what follows is the name of a human person.
And this is where it gets awesome: you can choose any heanoun you want as part of how you name yourself!! This is simply incredible as a tool to express your own understanding of your identity, and I have no words strong enough to praise that.

For instance, I could probably name myself jan Kojawaja if I try to transcribe Goyavoyage into toki pona. If I want to be specific, maybe I'd go for meli tonsi Kojawaja (enby woman Goyavoyage). But honestly, my favorite by far is soweli Solen, because "soweli" covers mostly terrestrial mammals, including the fox; and another name of mine is much easier to transcribe than my usual pseudonym; and also like it has a really nice ring to it I think. Anyway. All this is just to say that toki pona is great.

Overall, though a lot of people do use jan, I have seen various other uses, notably for plurality (kulupu, group) or otherkin (anything really, but soweli, kala and waso I've seen particularly).

I hope toki pona helps you explore your own identity, too.
(This is also a reminder that you should always respect how people name themselves in toki pona. (Pro tip: this is also true in any other language.))

VII - A paraphernalia of other useful resources

There are a few more noteworthy resources that feel important to mention here before we move onto the purely extra stuff.

The main one is the official toki pona website itself, of course. It notably contains links to buy pu and ku, the two books written by Sonja Lang, published respectively in 2014 and 2021. They are less up-to-date about community developments around toki pona word use and grammar than online stuff, of course, particularly pu; but I'm really enthusiastic about buying them soon. jan Sonja o, sina pona a.

Another one is this big resources hub by Zachary Sakowitz/sakawi, which has a lot of useful links. Some of them I've given in this post already, but it's really good to have this kind of compendium, with extra elements such as resources to learn toki pona's other glyph system, sitelen sitelen (I haven't done that yet!) or the webcomic Pepper and Carrot in toki pona.

Another thing I haven't started myself yet is getting acquainted with luka pona, the sign language related to toki pona. A deprecated 1-to-1 mapping of toki pona words onto hand signs named toki luka pona also existed once, but it has been replaced due to not working well at all as a sign language.
You can read more about luka pona in this introductory blog post by jan Olipija (written entirely in toki pona, as most ressources on the topic) or here on sona pona.

By now, I have mentioned it a few times, so let me also introduce the sona pona encyclopedia correctly: it's so great, and it is now my most consulted toki pona resource. It has so many fascinating articles, and notably articles about really obscure words with too scarce a use to find on lipu Linku/nimi.li.
Some of my favorite pages of it, that I also consider extremely useful, include:

VIII - Oral understanding and expression

With little surprise, oral expression happens reaaally late in the toki pona learning process. It requires speaking with people in toki pona, and to be honest I'm not there yet.

There's also listening to spoken toki pona, which I've been starting. And it's really fun! My favorite thing may be toki pona music: there is a toki pona music scene, and it's awesome and extremely varied. I have a soft spot for jan Usawi's music, which covers quite a wide range of styles.

Overall, see this very documented page of sona pona for ressources that may help you in that unending quest toward fluent spoken toki pona in general.

IX - Extras

Here, a few extra thoughts before closing this long post. Just because.

Maybe my suggested toki pona lessons will not work for you. You may want to try others. So here are others I have yet to try: this one by jan Kekan San, who has been very proactive in making toki pona fun and accessible (see also his video lessons); and this one I've just found but that does seem quite easy to get into!

toki pona is a living language. Even if it was constructed, its words' meanings shift over time, and sometimes new community consensuses emerge. Still, often you really can't impulse something new just by yourself - but there are definitely obscure uses of mostly unknown words here or there, and some whose use remains niche but meaningful, too.
As it often is with communication, the goal is to be understood, and toki pona has a complicated and fascinating relationship with adding new words. Still, smaller communities and new styles do emerge. It's a fantastic microcosm of a language, and I also like that a lot. I could seriously dive into its nonstandard animal, color or number words for a while.

Many people have created and translated things into toki pona! The sona pona encyclopedia is your oyster, really; but I must mention that entire video games have been translated by dedicated fans. Sometimes, this even includes the glyph system sitelen pona.
Seriously, wouldn't you like to try playing Celeste, TUNIC or A Short Hike in toki pona6? I sure do. I probably will one of these days.

Conclusion: why toki pona?

Because it's a wonderful language that can convey genuinely complex ideas but requires you to be able to break them down into core components.

Because it's easy and free to learn, a joy to understand, and it's so much fun.

Because it has headnouns and so much room for nongendered and nonhuman stories baked in.

Because it may get you acquainted more with semantic spaces, all the things and concepts that a word can cover. It's been notably valuable to me as I started learning Japanese later in 2024, from that initial toki pona dopamin boost. It's also just an interesting thing to think about, I think.

Because it has incredible words like soweli, waso... and the most legendary of them all, kijetesantakalu, a joke word meaning "raccoon" (or musteloids in general). It was invented by Sonja Lang for some April Fools', and stuck - even if, opposing the entire toki pona design philosophy, it is incredibly long and specific in meaning.
Seriously, kijetesantakalu just rules.

sitelen ni la, sina pini e lukin. soweli Solen la, mi la, sina pona.
mi wile e ni: sina pilin pona tan kama sona pi toki pona!


  1. I'd like to thank Phox from cohost who made a thread "every toki pona word as a fennec fox picture" at that time, which was the absolute best way to grab my attention.

  2. As toki pona is a living language, with new and old words used by the community as years pass, this is of course only partially true. But there are core toki pona words, still - the ones most toki pona speakers will understand for sure - and they're around 130, depending on who you ask. There's actually an annual survey run each year around August 8th (toki pona's anniversary date) to determine which words, including more obscure ones, are used to which extent!

  3. Aside from these, old cohost users may be interested in knowing that soweli nata translated The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin :')

  4. This in spite of my undying love of a certain yuri horror novel series... What can I say except that lesbians with issues overpower horror in my brain.

  5. As with everything, note that you can always bend rules, of course - no headnoun, only a headnoun, impossible syllables... Just be sure to know the base naming rules so that you do that purposefully and carefully. But your name is yours. It always is.

  6. These are great video games I like a lot, by the way. A Short Hike is by far the most accessible of the three - and one I can't recommend enough even to people not much into video games. It's one of my favorite games ever. I once wrote a recommendation of it on cohost and I may port it here someday.

#toki pona