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by Kivutar 1043 days ago
I've been reading, writing, and translating text in Toki Pona for a year.

My main criticism of the language is that the word are so abstract that understanding spoken Toki Pona at real speed is practically impossible. Too many possible translations. Too many ways of combining these words, and no mechanism to identify which words form a compound.

3 comments

> Too many possible translations.

In that sense, is it like deciphering Moby Dick in Emoji (Emoji Dick)[1] but with more consistency?

1: https://ia800305.us.archive.org/7/items/emojidick/emojidick....

I didn’t understand English at real speed either during my first years of learning. There’s a moment you easily understand all words in a conversation but it still require a bit subconscious effort so you don’t have enough “cortex RAM” left to understand the whole conversation meaning at first read/ear.
But the whole point is that English and Toki Pona are totally different languages and Toki Pona has a property which makes it harder than English to understand at speed.

You can't treat all languages the same. Just because you struggled with English doesn't mean that English is as hard to understand as speed as Toki Pona

Teach chatgpt toki pona ?
It already knows ;)