Comment by fjfaase | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fjfaase | Hacker News Reader

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I do not fully agree with you. Although it is a small language, it has language constructs that are foreign to English (and some of which I do not know of being used in any natural language, although I expect that there is an obscure language that does have them, as it is my experience that many 'wierd' language constructs found in constructed languages appear in natural languages). Just having fewer words, does not make a language simpler to use. It simply means that a lot of vocabular is created by combining words. This is also seen in a language like Chinese, where more complex concepts are made by combining two or more characters into a new concept. Over time, some of these sequences are used for other things than orginal intended to the extend that native speakers no longer are aware of the origin. You also see this in English and other natural languages.

English is not my native tongue and besides my native tongue, Dutch, I also understand some German, a little French, and a very little Chinese (Mandrin). I made some attempt to learn Toki Pona (about 10 ago). Although, I am not particular good at learning languages, I am more of a visual thinker, I have always had an interest in languages and have a collection of foreign language books and linguistics, see https://www.iwriteiam.nl/BookShelves.html#1.1

I am not sure if I get your point. Yes, having a small base vocabulary has trade offs and yes it is true that you will have to not just learn the meaning of every single word but also common idioms.

You can be up and running very fast in Toki Pona being able to produce and understand simple sentences about broad topics. If you need to be very specific, you will have a hard time but the philosophy of Toki Pona is to strive for simplicity and to focus on your core message.

You would have a hard time writing a scientific paper in Toki Pona but that is not what is was designed for anyway.

What language people have trouble learning can be a bit subjective and also heavily depend on the learning material and other outside factors. Sounds like Toki Pona didn't "click" with you which is fair enough. Maybe you want to give it another try or maybe it just is not for you, there are other interesting conlangs.

Toki Pona is relatively easy to learn not just for the small base vocabulary but also the relative simple phonology (Only 9 consonants and 5 vowel, always stress on initial syllable). Learning how to pronounce and write Toki Pona is extremely easy and regular.

Vocabulary is probably what takes the longest time in language learning, so you get a huge head start. The grammar might be very different to English or Dutch but has many similarities to Asian languages and is not that complex. As I argued for learning Toki Pona for mind expansion, I would argue that the difference is a good thing anyway.

I agree with what you say. But instead of learning Toki Pona, you could also learn the 100 most common Chinese words and probably say as much as you can say in Toki Pona. If you study that list, you will see that just like in Toki Pona, many of the words have multiple meanings and can be used in multiple modes.

Of course, Chinese being a tonal language and the use of characters make it a lot harder than Toki Pona, but the number of people you can talk with, is a lot larger.

One of the problems that I had when learning Toki Pona, is that I did not have access to native speakers. Learning a language from a book is a lot harder than learning it through daily use. Recent studies have shown that adapt there language when they talk to their children and that that might be one of the reasons why children learn a language so seemingly without any effort.

I understand that for adults that is also te best method for learning a new language, having a native speaker that is able to adjust his language use to your comprehension of the language.

This is kind of like the learn a programming language to get a job vs expand your mind discussion

If you want to learn a language for being able to talk to more people then yeah, most conlangs don't make sense. (Except maybe Esperanto for having a huge international community that is bigger than some smaller natural languages).

If anything, conlangs are good for filtering for people that share the interest of learning conlangs (which might be positively correlated with people being interested in linguistics, other cultures, open minded, nerdy or whatever) but not much for expanding the total mass of people you can talk to. It is a pretty nerdy hobby that many people do for the pleasure if learning the language itself. (Similar to hacking in a non mainstream programming language)

As for learning, adults and children do learn differently. While both profit from language immersion, adults do profit much more by explicitly learning grammar. It is a bit of personal preference though. For example I dislike learning vocabulary so I rely more on immersion and looking things up as I go. This might be slower but is more fun to me.

I should not be that hard to find other people learning Toki Pona on the internet but of course meeting some in real life might be difficult. So i agree with your point that total language immersion like you can do when traveling to a country were your target language is spoken is not possible with Toki Pona. You need to be fine with learning from books and videos.

Yes. For a language with simple rules, you quickly run into situations where you must decide how to express a simple concept, and you're inevitably going to "fall back" on constructions from your native language which seem perfectly logical to you which you aren't even aware of - but which may be strange, or outright incomprehensible to someone coming at it from a very different language.

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