Toki Pona: The Language You Can Learn in a Day

Video written by Corinne Neustadter

[IamSamys]

Ok, so this was an interesting video. There are some points I think would benefit from a correction, and I'll also add a note to some others:
0:00 mi sona ala e nimi sina.
0:12 120 words is one count, there are people who use more, some even use less - but of course that *is* the count in the official book
0:19 30 hours *on average*? No, on average it'll take longer, from the learners I've seen. Plus, 30 hours wouldn't exclude pauses, so subtract sleeping, eating and any other activity that isn't learning the language
0:30 "toki" is derived from Tok Pisin. Ultimately, it does come from English due to Tok Pisin being a pidgin, but I don't know why you would skip over that
0:53 English consonants? Spanish vowels? Oversimplification. "j" doesn't get pronounced like in English, and many languages have the same sounds for the vowels, Spanish is only one of them and they don't derive from Spanish directly. Weird choice.
1:07 "regardless of vowel placement" - Uh... I mean, that's true, but I don't see what vowel placement would have to do with it in the first place???
1:19 no, "ala" negates any content word, not just subjects, plus it can work as the head of its own phrase
1:21 toki pona does have those thing, just not as a part of the grammar
1:30 nothing ever gets capitalised in toki pona except for names
1:47 lists "o" as a possble interjection - ths might be up for debate, but currently is a bit unusual, I don't know why it would be listed here
1:48 typo: "pakola" should be "pakala"
1:57 ignoring the capitalisation, "sini" is a typo of "sina"
2:03 not quite - seme here is a modifier to "pilin", so instead of asking "you feel what", it's more "you what-feel" or "you feel in what way"
2:12 while it limits communication (intentionally of course), you can build from the basics to talk about anything
2:15 typicall, there's no polite speech, and there's nothing that would indicate formal speech, but politeness can be included - it's a cultural distinction that doesn't feature in toki pona as a fixed part, but certainly you can act out a set of expected things or phrases if you need to be polite in the context of who you're talking to
2:18 ok, yes, that can work - "start with pona" - that's good - expressing gratitude is a whole topic on itself, so having this in the video should be ok, even if it's not the whole story
2:25 yeah, similarly, this can work - there is an expansion that includes more words that can work for very exact numbers - although "ala" and "ale" would also work for non-exact numbers
2:31 ok, so I didn't mishear the beginning of the video - there were some syllables swallowed - the "e" in "mute" does get pronounced
2:46 noun phrases? nope - full sentences, context, not long noun phrases, in fact long noun phrases make it hard to understand
2:47 noun phrases come after the word they describe? That's... modifiers. Ok, so we have different terminology, but that still isn't right
2:53 oh, "j" doesn't get pronounced like that typically
2:56 uh, no, that's not the translation. More like "is a moving box". You might have been missing a couple of things
3:13 "suwi" coming first means you're talking about a more sugary substance rather than a liquid, so you'd usually have "telo" first. Then there's the issue of "kepeken" not meaning "with" in the same exact way as in English, and "en" being in an untypical place as far as modern courses are teaching (although it was used that way in earlier versions of toki pona, so you might still come across it, and people do use it, so it's not totally wrong, just one thing among many that are weird to be included there) - oh, and it'd probably "kule pi ijo kasi" if I follow the thought of what is said here
3:36 arabic is alphabetical (well, usually an abjad), and pretty phonetical

What's missing from my-this comment is that there are points about the philosophy that are slightly off. Discussing this would take the same amount of text twice over, and I'd have to disentangle/put into appropriate context the more quippy parts of the video that aren't meant to be fact giving as much as the rest

[artiomboyko]

Sam is so good at being bad he made a ton of orthography and pronunciation mistakes in a language with one of the easiest orthographies and phonologies

[janopa]

Hi! There appear to be a few errors here, here's a few clarifications from a self-proclaimed advanced toki pona speaker:
30 hours is a reasonable time frame to get speaking the language, but mastery takes a long time, like any language.
The first letters of toki pona words are never capitalized, that's reserved for loan words, so 'mi moku' instead. 'pakola' is a mispelling of pakala, 'sini' for sina.
Yes it is true that having so few words makes it difficult to specify exact things, but toki pona relies more heavily on context than large noun phrases. For bricks, 'kiwen' (rock) by itself may work well. 'poki loje lon sinpin li poki tawa' means more like, 'the red boxes on the wall are moving boxes'.
I believe Arabic's script is in fact phonetically based, but I am not very familiar.
Thanks for shedding some light on our language!

[jannanpason]

As a toki pona speaker, I am so glad this guy makes a "mistakes" video every year.

[Naftoreiclag]

In case anyone's wondering, someone who learned toki pona in only one day would sound like Sam does in this video.

[SeSmokki]

For having so few sounds and words to learn, Sam completely butchered the pronunciation lmao.

[lovestarlightgiver]

One thing that wasn't mentioned is that toki pona is a contextual language. telo could mean water, but it can also just mean liquid. Once you use some of the few words in the language to try to describe a drink like coffee, you can just call it "telo ni" (this liquid) after that. Also, if the person is there with you and they can clearly see that it's coffee, you can just say "telo ni" since the context is already clear.

[kaitschu]

There are actually some Toki Pona natives, although not entirely successfully so. (Aronora made an interview)
And at 1:56 you said "sini" instead of "sina"
Oh and just a side note: The goal of Toki Pona is to be simplistic, so using large noun chains isn't encouraged

[swim]

As a linguist, any time Sam puts out a video on language, I notice so many errors, though most of them aren’t *too* bad.
I wonder if it’s the same in his other videos and I just don’t notice because I know next to nothing about logistics, geography or engineering…

[josuelservin]

Judging by the comments, this episode is gonna be quite prominent in the next "Every mistake" video XD Still, tanks for bringing more attention to this interesting language!

[mushmush]

Can we appreciate how the woman who made up this language is actually named Lang

[jimbo]

guys i think he tried to learn the language within a day

[joaovitormatos]

Learning a language to talk to robots is literally what computer programming is

[MrMineHeads.]

Arabic is 100% a phonetically written language. Sure, sometimes the vowels are not explicitly written, but they can be made explicit and the consonants are always written.

[_Mikarific_]

toki a! I've been a speaker of toki pona for the past 2-3 years now. I don't comment much, but this video makes a LOT of mistakes that I'd like to correct. My earlier comment got deleted because the amount of corrections I had was so long that YouTube thought it was spam so I'll make this JUST the really bad corrections.

Even with all of these mistakes corrected, this video remains a terrible jumping off point for learning Toki Pona and will affect the community. People will come to Toki Pona with the assumption that they can learn it in a day and that it's great for speaking to computers, neither of which are true (I'm the developer of one of the best toki pona machine translators, I would know.) In its current state, new learners of Toki Pona coming from this video creates a problem of requiring new learners to first unlearn what they learned here, before learning the language. That being said...

0:00 - The thumbnail of the video says "kipisi sama kama e wile sona", which translates back to "to slice your want for knowledge similarly to becoming". I get that it's going for "half as interesting", but this thumbnail is a sentence fragment that is nearly meaningless.
0:53 - The consonents are based off of Latin letters, not English letters. And things are pronounced nearly identically to each letters sound in the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet).
1:19 - Toki Pona does have gender and tenses, these things are just not intrinsic to sentence and you can specify them if you deem them relevant. For example, the words "mije", "meli", and "tonsi" mean "man", "woman", and "non-binary" respectively.
1:29 - Sentences in toki pona are NEVER capitalized. Capitalizing a sentence in toki pona is gramatically incorrect. A Capitalized word signifies that the word is a name that describes a noun and is not used when starting a sentence.
1:46 - "pakola" is not a word in toki pona. This is a mispelling of "pakala".
1:55 - "Sini" is also not a word in toki pona. This is a mispelling of "sina". Also this should be uncapitalized.
2:30 - "mute" is pronounced with two syllables, "mu" and "te". It should be pronounced "mu-te", and not "moot".
2:39 - Describing something in Toki Pona WITHOUT CONTEXT can take more words. Many things that I say in toki pona would require more words in English to say the same. Toki Pona is more broad than English, but you don't need to make up for that broadness to be understood. In context, just "telo" by itself could mean "coffee", rather than what's shown in a later example.
2:49 - The translation for "I love bricks", "poki loje lon sinpin li poki tawa.", is just... not even the same sentence as "I love bricks."... or even close... This translates back to (being generous with the translation, because I would read "lon sinpin" as "at the front" instead) "The red container at the wall is a moving container." I think what he WANTED to say was "poki loje lon sinpin li pona tawa mi.", which is better, translating to "The red container at the wall is good to me." But... this sentence should be something like "kiwen leko loje li pona tawa mi.", which translates to "The red block-like rock is good to me."
2:52 - The letter "j" is pronounced like the English letter "y", not like the English letter "h". It's similar to how it's pronounced in German or Swedish.
3:13 - The pronunciation for "suwi telo wawa kepeken namako en kule ijo kasi." is just... completely butchered. The first syllable of a word in toki pona is always the one to be stressed. It is not "kePEken", it is "KEpeken". This is true for every word. "ijo" is pronounced wrong. Vowels in toki pona are pronounces similar to Spanish or Esperanto, where the vowel "i" should be pronounced like the english letter "e".
3:13 - "suwi telo wawa kepeken namako en kule ijo kasi" translates back to "Energetic watery sweets with spice and plant-like thing-like colors." The usage of "en" here means that this statement would only work as the subject of a sentence, and is two seperate subjects, the color and the wood and the sweets. "en" does NOT act like "and". Since we're describing a liquid, "telo" should come first. "telo suwi wawa namako pi kule kasi" would be a good way to describe coffee, meaning "plant colored spicy energetic sweet drink." But this is overly specific and just "telo wawa namako" would get across "coffee" to a toki pona speaker.
3:30 - As mentioned before, "siTElen pona" should be "SItelen pona"
3:36 - Arabic is absolutely phonetic.

There is a lot more that it gets wrong, and I've posted the rest of the list in the replies.

[BeefinOut]

jan Misali has a great video series teaching Toki Pona, and he's also one of the best YouTubers out there in general.

[Qfeys]

As someone who has been learning this language on and off for about a year: no, you can not learn it in a day.

[inari.]

I have a few corrections. I'm a fluent toki pona speaker who's been learning since 2019, and this video gets quite a bit wrong.
0:33 toki is derived from Tok Pisin, not English.
0:48 The English alphabet has 26 letters. Both English and toki pona use the Latin alphabet.
0:56 They're not "based off" the English letters. They're common sounds cross-linguistically, and they use the same glyphs that the IPA uses to represent them.
1:00 They're not Spanish. They just have a similar pronunciation.
1:19 None of these are articles.
1:48 pakala, not pakola.
1:57 sina, not sini.
2:30 You pronounce the e in mute. It's, vaguely, "moo-tay" (or /mute/ in the IPA)
2:53 j is not pronounced like h. It's pronounced like y.
2:58 This sentence doesn't mean that. It actually means "red container on wall is moving container". I think you wanted to say "leko loje sinpin li pona tawa mi", or "red wall box is good to me".
3:14 Stress each word on the first syllable. ijo sounds like ee-yo. Adjectives come after nouns, so telo wawa suwi. You don't need ijo here. You don't have to say all that to describe a coffee - I would settle for telo kapesi (brown liquid) or telo wawa (strong liquid).
3:31 Stress sitelen on the first syllable.
4:00 Sam breaks toki pona's phonotactics - you can't have m at the end of a syllable. You'd have to go for San instead. HAI is also against the phonotactics, not just because there's an h but also because you can't have two vowels next to each other
This isn't everything, but it's most of what I picked up on.
I don't really like how this video portrays toki pona as difficult or unwieldy to use - the purpose of toki pona is simplicity, and if you try to stuff an entire English sentence into toki pona, you're doing it wrong. It's about reduction of a concept to its most basic form, not describing every single aspect of something. Context amd relevance are key.
Either way, if this video serves as an entry point of more people into the community, I'm happy. It would just be nicer if this video got more things right.

[sabikikasuko]

The last time Sam did conlang video, it got everything absolutely wrong. Glad to see traditions are still alive lmao

[SouthHypocrite]

While I'm glad to see toki pona being featured and getting more recognition, there's so much wrong with this video that it kinda hurts to watch. Everyone, please look into this language beyond this video because this does not do it justice.