Toki Pona: The Language You Can Learn in a Day
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 ธ.ค. 2022
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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
a a a mi wan kin li sitelen suli e pakala ali ona · mi jan pi nasin sama a ·
your essay is longer than mine
Same, jan Alasali o. I also wrote quite a long one. And while writing it, I thought: jan Ke Tami is definitely writing as well. (based on his behaviour on the subreddit)
a a a sina ale li pona!
@@janalasali6912 a a do I win a prize for longest essay then? /s taso toki mi li suli tan ni: mi toki e ale lon tu li kepeken toki Inli li kepeken toki pona.
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
This. As a person that never heard about the language before, I was so confused when he first stated that the vowels are based on Spanish and the proceeded to pronounce every word as if it was an English one anyway :D
Someone who learned toki pona in only one day would sound like Sam does in this video.
He also butchered the grammar in the intro. I mean, I was able to work it out, but still.
lon.. a a a
@@Naftoreiclag he and the writing team collectively put in 8 hours :D
Learning a language to talk to robots is literally what computer programming is
Python with extra steps lol
I'm pretty sure they said AI and not robots.
Programming languages can only express mathematically defined things whereas toki pona can express more general, human things. Computers are bad at this, so making human language more code-like, with fewer, well defined words, makes a lot of sense, if you want to talk to bots.
Fr
Better hope you chose the right programming language though.
For having so few sounds and words to learn, Sam completely butchered the pronunciation lmao.
lon a. pilin mi la jan sin mute pi ma Mewika (en mi) li kalama pakala lon open. ona li kama nasin pi toki Inli e toki pona. taso jan ni pi sitelen tawa li pakala nasa a. mute ~~ moot a a a
Yeah, a lot of English speakers that I know mess up pronunciation to some extent by Americanising how it should be said when they're starting out, and I did it too, but somehow Sam messed up a lot. "mute" (two syllables even) was said like "moot" lol
There's something especially hilarious about pointing out that stress always comes on the first syllable, and then screwing that up several times later in the video.
not just pronunciation. he straight up just mentioned random facts about it and didnt even mention the philosophy, reasons for being made, etc. its sucks to see something im so pationate for get so misrepresentnted.
Well to be fair, toki pona is supposed to be accepting of many different pronunciations, but yeah there were a few instances of completely unintelligible ones in this video. Despite speaking toki pona for years I still sometimes put the stress on the wrong syllable, especially in my songs, but that's may be because of my main language and the influence of its culture on my accent...
Yeah
In case anyone's wondering, someone who learned toki pona in only one day would sound like Sam does in this video.
I think that someone who learned it in one hour would do better
@@jownadel1526 within my first 10 minutes i sounded accurate. i just wished sam had gotten a speaker to check the pronounciation
I've been subscribed to the subreddit for 4 years. So I'm basically an expert
@@MizhiBirb and grammar
There's pretty compelling evidence he used AI generated text for the translations lol
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!
Ok
I speak Arabic, I went WTF when he said that Arabic script is non phonetic.
Each letter is a distinct sound.
To the point writing a word you just heard for the first time is a thoughtless action.
Arabic is phonetic but it's an impure abjad not an alphabet. An abjad being a writing system that only has consonants and impure because long vowels are written.
I'm always skeptical of estimates of how long it takes to learn a language. Using my own constructed language of choice Leo Tolstoy claimed to have taught himself Esperanto in a single day, which is dubious to say the least.
Also as someone who flunked out of an Arabic language course the writing system for Arabic and many other languages in that part of the world including Hebrew is called an abjad. Basically it's like an alphabet, but the vowels are mostly or entirely omitted. Sometimes in Arabic they're marked with small characters above the main line of text that often get mistaken for diacritics.
@@tjenadonn6158 I'm with you there. I'm not too familiar with Esperanto, I believe I've heard it's grammar advertised as extremely consistent and easy to learn, if so, this less impressive "learning Esperanto in one day" sounds reasonable to me. (toki pona even more so!) But this says nothing of the memorization and practice involved to twist your brain into how another language sees things. In my estimation, it takes a month at least to be conversational in toki pona
As a toki pona speaker, I am so glad this guy makes a "mistakes" video every year.
can't wait to see all the ones in this...
the pronounciation
the spelling
the grammar
there's so many
atleast it's getting toki pona out there
says j is like /dɮ/ then pronounces it like /h/ even though it's said like /j/.
His mistakes for this is gonna be longer than the video itself
@@MizhiBirb oh hey cherry! I hope I’m not mistaking you for someone else bc thatd be terrible. Agreed, I’m hoping that it gets it out there, but it didn’t do a great job at making it look good sadly.
sitelen ni jo e pakala mute mute
conspiracy theory: he didn’t have enough mistakes in the other videos for the video to be long enough so he made this one to ensure he would have enough content
guys i think he tried to learn the language within a day
clearly
musi a!
ona li jo ala e tenpo mute anu seme?
@@janajusimi269 mi toki insa e ni: ona li sona ala e toki pona. jan lipu ona li sitelen e lipu pi sitelen tawa ni. jan San li lukin taso
a a lon,,
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
@@busimagen you are correct, there are no silent letters in toki pona
@@busimagen yeah all letters in toki pona are pronounced exactly like IPA, so for example "a" is pronounced as /a/ and "j" is pronounced as /j/
@@busimagen I could get it if he was talking about Esperanto: our phonology can be tricky at times with "c" making the [ts] sound (think the "zz" in "pizza") and some of the more idiosyncratic accented characters like "ĥ" (pronounced like the "ch" in "Loch".) But Toki Pona literally has the simplest alphabet and phonology of any language we know of.
Large noun chains are important when context alone can't describe them. Differentiating two similar ideas or introducing a thing in the abstract
@@infiniteplanes5775 Multiple sentences are encouraged in those contexts, rather than large noun chains.
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.
Paused the video to look for this comment
@@mplo23 Same haha
I don't know if this exactly means the same thing as "100% phonetically written" but in old english, every written letter was pronounced (no silent letters)
While Arabic does occasionally have silent letters, it follows rules, and is akin to the K in knife not being pronounced. It absolutely is phonetic, and you can add inflections over the letters to better phonate a letter…
@@TheOCDDoc "occasionally?" Arabic short vowels are unwritten and implied 99% of the time unless you're reading something for kids or the Quran
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!
I’m expecting this to be taken down soon and reuploaded with fixes
@@rcoder01 absolutely. gonna take a while to fix all these mistakes though haha.
i still have all the respect for sam and what he does but like... atleast get a speaker to check if you're saying it right...
ijo as "eye yo"
mispells sina as sini
there's so much. defo gonna take a while to redo
this better get a good amount of screentime because this video barly discribed actual toki pona.
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He could as well redo this whole video.
Can we appreciate how the woman who made up this language is actually named Lang
Also, her first name, Sonja, sounds a lot like "sona" which means knowledge. so "jan Sonja" is pretty similar to "jan sona" (teacher)! It's such a great coincidence!
not her maiden name, she married into it, I believe after she made the language
@@IamSamys a musi. mi sona ala e ni a. ni li namako musi
Indeed. It's the kind of name that almost obligates a person to become a linguist. Just like Tito Beveridge *had* to start a vodka brand, George McGovern *had* to become a politician, and Usain Bolt *had* to become an Olympic sprinter.
@@danielbishop1863 a a a
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.
ni li lon! ijo li ken ijo wan tawa jan wan li ken ijo ante tawa jan ante. telo ni li wawa e jan lon tenpo open la ona li telo wawa. telo ni li suwi taso tawa jan la ona li ken telo suwi.
That's true! Things can be named differently by different people in different contexts, whether it might be an energy drink in the morning to someone or a sweet drink to enjoy for someone else.
(or as you said, "telo ni" in the context of pointing at coffee a a)
@@pomelo9518 yup! a lot of toki pona words are like that, where you might find it has a default meaning for a more general word like "poki" means box or just container, plus depending on how they're placed in a scentace each word can be used as a noun, adjective, of verb like "toki" means language, but after li which makes it a verb it means "to talk" or "talking" etc. and it can be used as an adjective! for instance "jan" means person, and putting one word after another (except for grammar markers like li, since they only indicate the next word is a different part of speech) makes it an adjective on that stuff so "jan toki" would mean "talkative person" or "communicator"! (though some there aren't really cases where you would)
in my language telo ni means this egg
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 TH-cam 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.
2:12 - More than the basics can be communicated. Please see this video explaining non-euclidean geometry in Toki Pona. th-cam.com/video/tL1WBUOqE48/w-d-xo.html (English subtitles are available)
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.
maybe you could put the other corrections in the reply section?
this is true
good comment!!
sona pona a!!
@@dylanbksp Good Idea! Here's the rest of the less important corrections.
0:00 - In the introduction, Sam says "toki! nimi mi li Sam". In toki pona, names are adjectives, and this name is not describing a noun like it should. Therefore a better way to say this is "mi jan Sam", or "I am the person named Sam". Also, names in toki pona become "tokiponized" to fit the syllable structure, this is not a big deal tho and names are commonly used without tokiponization.
0:27 - "toki" is derived from the Tok Pisin word "tok" which itself is derived from the English word "talk". Close enough?
0:14 - While the video says it's comprised of 120 words, there have been many revisions to that and the commonly accepted number of words now is 137, updated to include the words from the book "The Toki Pona Dictionary" (which I've contibuted to!). This video actually uses many of the extra 17 words, with "kipisi" being in the thumbnail and "namako" being in the video.
0:16 - I think saying you can learn it in hours is an overstatement. People like to say you can learn it quickly, and you can (I was barely conversational in 3 days), but don't expect to be speaking well in such little time.
1:17 - None of the things listed here are articles.
1:17 - "ala" does not solely negate subjects, it negates literally any content word.
1:17 - I would say that "en" doesn't "introduce a new subject" but rather "concatenates two subjects together into one". While it's not incorrect it can be misleading.
1:25 - While "mi moku." can mean "I am eating." and "I am food." it's fairly uncommon for that to be actually ambigous because context does a lot in toki pona.
1:44 - Interjections can be basically any word that makes sense, and are not limited to being one word, such as "tawa pona!" meaning "Good bye!".
1:44 - "o" as an interjection is a bit strange. It doesn't really do that on it's own as an interjection, but rather comes after a subject to say "Hey (subject of the sentence)! (rest of the sentence)"
1:44 - "ala" is more like "not" rather than "no". toki pona does not have "yes" and "no", you either repeat the verb of a sentence or negate that verb to answer a yes or no question. For the purposes of translating it as an interjection tho, this is fine.
2:14 - There is no way to say "Thank You" because politeness is implied. You can say "sina pona." for "You are good." which you do see from time to time.
2:21 - While "laso" meaning "blue" isn't incorrect, "laso" also means "green". There is no distinction between green and blue in Toki Pona, they are the same color. I like to describe laso as "grue".
2:23 - While there are no numbers in toki pona, theres a common numbering system that uses "luka" (meaning "hand") for 5, "mute" (meaning "many") for 20, and "ale" (meaning "all") for 100. "ale mute luka tun wan" would mean "100+20+5+2+1", or "128".
3:56 - Writing "SAM" like that is possible but phonetically incorrect because "Sam" isn't a valid syllable. This would become "San". Also, "HAI" would get this same treatment, becoming something like "Ajeja" or "Eseja".
4:04 - There ARE native speakers of toki pona, but they are quite young. Check out Aronora's video on the subject. th-cam.com/video/iZ2zBQbqKB8/w-d-xo.html
4:26 - Playing Minecraft in toki pona is very playable! I play minecraft in toki pona all the time! It's a great way to learn the language and I recommend it to people trying to learn all the time. I am also one of the people who contribute translations for Minecraft, so if you decide to try it, you're looking at (partially) my work!
4:41 - AI currently speaks toki pona... really badly... I'm the creator of the toki pona translation discord bot "ilo Kukole", and it just isn't accurate at all, but is considered by the community to be one of the better translators out there. AI is good at taking audio and recognising what is being said, but nobody has made a successful chat bot in toki pona.
jan ale o, o lukin e ni!!!
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…
I almost want to send my brother who drives big rigs for a living one of his videos on the trucking industry.
@@tjenadonn6158 you should, it would be interesting to see what he has to say
It's very possible! J.J. McCullough dives into this in part of a recent video he made... Though I'm not sure where the timestamp would be lol. th-cam.com/video/UDaoRJXb2FU/w-d-xo.html (edit: just looked through it. Seems to be at about 6:48)
Essentially, mistakes are sooo much more obvious when you're familiar with the material surrounding them. So if it's, say an article or TH-cam video, and the parts that seem credible are only the parts you're unfamiliar with, it's entirely possible that they seem riddled with mistakes to experts in those specific subjects.
they're sometimes really bad.
I'm into Geography, there's very few mistakes in those videos
As someone who has been learning this language on and off for about a year: no, you can not learn it in a day.
a ni a li lon. mi toki tawa jan mute la jan mute li toki e ijo sama ni: ona li kama sona lon tenpo mun tu wan a. pini ni la ona li kama ken toki pona. taso jan ante li kepeken tenpo pi suli ante. suno *wan* taso la ni li suli.
That's true. Between all the people I've spoken to, a fair amount say it took them about three months to learn it conversationally, but of course others still took longer, all still being longer than a single day though.
If you're familiar with linguistics, you could get the grammar and pronunciation down within a day, although the words would take a few days to memorize and it would take a lot of input and practice to get common practices down
no prpbably can learn how to translate most phrases in a day, but yhere's no way someome becomes fluent at it in a day
@@0x6a09 Something along those lines would be possible.
I was able to teach all the (pu) grammar and vocabulary to a group of people within three days (for a few hours during each day). It worked rather well. Although most of them individually were still forgetting a lot, as a group they were sometimes able to suggest better sentences then I would come up with.
@@mskiptr still, i don't think that counts as "fluent"
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.
lon a. mi open lukin e sitelen tawa la mi pilin pona suli tan ni: a jan suli a li kama lukin e toki pona a! mi olin a e toki ni! taso sitelen tawa li pakala la ona li pona suli ala.
Yeah, I was really excited to see a video covering a favourite topic of mine, but it's really sad to see it be so messed up unfortunately.
ni mute
mi pilin sama a :/
For those wanting to find out more, Langfocus has a really good video that gives an overview of the language, and to learn the language you can find a really good video lesson series on jan Kekan San's channel
jan Misali has a great video series teaching Toki Pona, and he's also one of the best TH-camrs out there in general.
Perhaps the most prominent Toki Pona TH-camr out there, with lots of other fun varied content.
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New radio shows?
My favourite cute fraud.
Two of them!
As an Arab, I have to correct you on one thing: Arabic is totally a phonetic language. Sometimes the 3 basic vowels are not written (أ-و-ي) but these instead are replaced with signs that correlate to each noun. Heck, 90% of Arabic grammar is about knowing when each sign should be used and what not, and I guarantee Arabic wouldn't be hard if those signs didn't even exist. So no, Arabic is phonetic.
As someone learning MSA. Yeah... The video is just wrong.
Americans see squiggly lines on paper "ah yes pictograms"
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Correction about Arabic: It is in fact a phonetic writing system, it's just unless you're writing something for learners or the exact pronunciation, you don't use the little vowel markers. Only consonants and long vowels
Examples;
(note: I'm using this symbol [:] for long vowels, which are always written in Arabic.)
Also Arabic is written from right to left and tends to be formatted small so the formatting might be a little weird here (TH-cam is really wonky with Arabic and Hebrew writing because of that), feel free to plug this in a document and crank up the font size if you have trouble seeing stuff.
{ انا مارك }[a:na: m:ark] (I am Mark) is an entirely phonetic sentence, one-for-one, in part because of the long vowels. Technically you can add indications that the raa and kaa do not have any vowel to make it less ambiguous, but for the most part it is phonetic. Notice both a:na: and ma:rk take on the alif for the long "a" sound.
{ انا طليبة }[a:na: Tali:b(t)a] (I am a [female] student) the word "Tali:ba" is written with a taa marbuta (ة), which indicates femininity and changes to a regular taa (ت) when suffixes are added or plurality are indicated. While the consonants are indicated, the short vowels are not. (the capital T is a retroflex consonant, different from taa).
The above sentence with vowel markers would be انا طَليبَة. Taa marbuta takes on the "a" sound automatically until it changes to normal taa in changes such as طليبتي [Tali:bati:] (my [female] students)
Also yes, in the present tense Arabic drops "to be". To say "I was a (female) student", you would say كُنتُ طليبة [kuntu Tali:b(t)a]. But if you don't say the short "u", it becomes "she was a student" (كانتْ طليبة) [ka:nat Tali:b(t)a]. The grammar is way more complex than the writing system, and that's the hardest part about Arabic, not the writing. It's kind of like Spanish but much harder because of other verb aspects.
That's just the tip of the iceberg, but otherwise I'm glad to see more people interested in topics like languages.
Corrections about your comment:
*أنا مارك
Because there's a difference between ٱ (hamzat wasl) and أ (hamzat qat3)
Also the IPA for that is not [aːnaː maːrk], but [ʔanaː maːrk] or [ʔana maːrk] if you're using quran tajweed rules.
Why do you write طليبة? Why not write the much more common طالبة? My dictionary doesn't even list طليبة!
Same thing as انا مارك, it should be written أنا طليبة and the IPA should be [ʔanaː tˤɑˤliːba] or [ʔana tˤɑˤliːba] or [ʔanaː tˤɑˤliːbah] or [ʔana tˤɑˤliːbah] or [ʔanaː tˤɑˤliːbatun] or [ʔana tˤɑˤliːbatun] or [ʔanaː tˤɑˤliːba(h/tun)] or [ʔana tˤɑˤliːba(h/tun)] depending on how specific you want to be and which form you want to accommodate and whether you're using quranic tajweed rules or not.
The IPA for كُنتُ طَلِيبَةً is also wrong, it should be [kuntu tˤɑˤliːba] or [kuntu tˤɑˤliːbah] or [kuntu tˤɑˤliːbatun] or [kuntu tˤɑˤliːba(h/tun)] depending on how accomodating you want to be.
No if you remove the short u from كُنتُ it either becomes كُنت, or كنتُ, or كنت which all don't mean anything. It certainly does *not* become كَانَت
And even if it did become كَانَت طَلِيبَةً the IPA for that is incorrect, because it would be [kaːnatˤ tˤɑˤliːba] or [kaːnat tˤɑˤliːba] or [kaːnatˤ tˤɑˤliːbah] or [kaːnat tˤɑˤliːbah] or [kaːnatˤ tˤɑˤliːbatun] or [kaːnat tˤɑˤliːbatun] or [kaːnatˤ tˤɑˤliːba(h/tun)] or [kaːnat tˤɑˤliːba(h/tun)] depending on how accomodating you want to be and whether you're using quranic tajweed rules or not.
The last time Sam did conlang video,it got everything absolutely wrong. Glad to see traditions are still alive lmao
a a toki pali seme li lon sitelen tawa pakala nanpa pini? mi lukin ala e ona.
lol what conland was the last video on? I haven't seen it.
@@mamusipipalisajelo5419 ithkuil
@@mamusipipalisajelo5419 and his pronunciation is just 💀
@@goobs.. a sina pona
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.
a a mi en jan ante luka pi lukin mi li kin li toki e pakala lon toki anpa sama sina. wile la ona o lukin e at least wan pi mi ale a
no inari don't tell them about nimi sin people don't use it'll only get worse /j
hi inari!
@@bananacat3109 :nimisin: sini: HAI
But Tok Pisin is an English creole language, whose name is derived from the English words "talk" and "pidgin". So "tok" *is* derived from English, just indirectly.
even though you can learn the language in a day, it doesnt seem like the hai writers bothered to learn anything about it
TRUE
Yeah, this one really is a dud.
you can't, really
It probably takes about 2 weeks to a month
I’m amazed that Sam managed to butcher the pronunciation of a language that has 14 simple sounds in total
to all of you not familiar with toki pona i beg you please go watch literally anyone else's video on it. jan Misali's are good but anything is better.
i really don't like being mean online but this is a popular channel with presumably enough resources to at least, spend a bit more time reviewing stuff before putting it out. like maybe run the video through a couple people who speak the language and could point some of these things out; as other people have said, it is an actual language that is spoken by people, and it doesn't seem like a lot of those people's input went into this. i really hope the people for whom this is the first exposure to toki pona actually go look at other sources
it really wouldn't be as bad if the video didn't present itself as somehow being an authoritative source on the language while not even being close to an accurate surface reading of it
I watched this video soon after it came out, and it was the first time I ever heard of toki pona. I shoved it into my memory as just another one of the interesting things Sam talks about. Around a month or two later (although before looking at the upload date I probably would have said I watched this video in 2021 and it was over a year later), I saw it somewhere else. I had recently decided I wanted to be a linguist, so I figured I'd learn toki pona. It took me a while, and I rarely tried to learn anything until this summer, but in recent weeks I've started getting very close to fluency. This is the first time since December that I've watched this video, and it's really sad to see how inaccurate it is. Still, thank you for introducing me to this amazing language and this amazing community.
- jan Osuka
It's unsettling to me how someone so knowledgeable just...cannot produce basic sounds without them being overtly "American" 💀 having flashbacks to his China videos
this video really needs to be redone omg. it's so simple and there are so many errors :(
Even though I speak Toki Pona, his butchered pronunciation made me feel I was having a stroke.
toki pona speaker here, you absolutely can't learn to use the language in a day. You might memorize the vocab but you won't be conversational without at least a few weeks of effort. Less than any other language but it's still literally a langauge
@@busimagen I spend a ton of time teaching it and while you can definitely learn some *phrases* within a day, you aren't going to be conversational. I'd say for me personally, it took me between 1-2 weeks of ~3-7 hours per day interacting with the language in some way (chatting on discord, attempting to talk, reading things people wrote, listening to music and other media, etc) before I could really carry on a conversation.
There's an aspect of perspective that you need to learn for toki pona that isn't so much present in many other languages. Because toki pona relies on describing concepts broadly and narrowing them down, rather than having pre-set words for specific things, it takes practice to be able to interpret those descriptions. The words have a semantic range much wider than any natlang I'm aware of, and it also has some fairly unique (or at least rare) grammar features, especially for english learners.
I do agree that a dedicated learner with experience in how to approach language learning for efficiency will do well though.
I'd like to the discord learning server but I've done that in other comments and they seem to be deleted. Lovely how relevant stuff gets deleted but porn scam comments just go to every video...
toki sina li lon a. jan mute pi sona mi li kepeken tenpo sama mun tu wan tawa ken toki pona pi toki pona. jan ante li ken kepeken tenpo ante. taso awen la suno wan taso li ken ala a a.
Yeah, between the people I've talked to, a lot say they became conversational about after three months. People may take different amounts of time, but in no way is it going to be one day.
*sees title*
"You overestimate my ability to learn things"
don't worry, he didn't do a perfect job either
especially pronunciation, which i presume is because the writer didn't communicate that well
yep, in my experience it took around two-ish weeks to get comfortable with grammar and stuff, and I'm still figuring out new things as I go.
Arabic is phonetic😐
It just has an abjad instead of an alphabet
He may as well have said that languages that use Cyrillic aren't phonetic.
It isn’t too hard to talk about coffee in toki pona if the sentence and concepts are simplified. Part of the design of the language is using simple sentences and compound words that only contain the amount of information you need to communicate your desired message.
@@busimagen well there's no single word for "wood", but i suppose `telo kasi` ("plant liquid") could work
or to refer to the color you could do `telo pi kule ma` ("earth-colored liquid"), or if you really want wood then `telo pi kule pi kiwen kasi` ("plant·hardness-colored liquid") but that's very long
though generally my preferred translation would be `telo wawa` ("energy liquid") or `telo pi lape ala` ("no-sleep liquid"), because those say what it's _for_ instead of giving unnecessary details about its origin or color (unless of course the origin/color matters in a given conversation)
This method of reducing a language to a basic number of meaning-containing units and constructing words by combining them is extremely common in constructed languages. A classic example is the Esperanto word for hospital, "malsanulejo," which combines the negating unit "mal-," the unit meaning health "san-," the unit meaning person "ul-," and the unit meaning place "ejo," so you get something that literally translates to "un-healthy-people-place." Sam has previously made a video about Ithkuil, which takes this concept to the extreme. You'd think he knows how this works by now.
@@hecko-yes telo wawa and telo pi lape ala do seem to be good translations. or even just "telo" if its just like, a drink and you dont need to specify coffee.
@@hecko-yes what is the purpouse of this language if there is no simple way to convey something as basic as coffe?
@@mateuszbugaj799 You probably don't think about exactly what coffee is and the process of making it every time you say the word coffee. If I'm having a conversation with someone in the morning and I mention that I have my morning coffee, I'd probably just say "telo wawa". If you require more context, the result is more verbose, but that's the case for every natural language
I no longer trust this channel to give accurate information
I couldn't have made a worse video about toki pona if I wanted to, honestly
@@sehr.geheim Is that a challenge? 👀
no one should have trusted it on conlangs ever since their ithkuil video
we've been joking about "phenomes" for uh _(checks date)_ over a year and a half now
This only happened now? lol
@@mamusipipalisajelo5419 please do
*Welcome to HAI, the show that gets facts wrong about **_your_** favourite conlang*
a a a musi
a
lmaooo
a a, mi sona
a a, ni li pana e pona tawa mi
Hello! It’s nice to see you take interest in Toki Pona!
I would like to point out that there are some fundamental misconceptions being presented however. After the 1:00 mark, the video begins a narrative that is misrepresentative of the language. Others have already pointed out the grammatical and factual errors. But even with those changed, the video narrative still will not capture the fundamental cultural or philosophical mindset that makes this language work. I think to fix this video, the narrative will need to be redone from scrach.
For example, the way coffee is described is not how toki pona speakers speak. I would simply personally say telo wawa or telo pimeja. Long noun phrases aren't a big part of the language in practice. Toki Pona is a language where you build a shared vision with the person you're speaking to, and establish a shared context. This makes the language generally short and concise, contrary to what it might look like if you haven't studied it.
I feel like promoting this misconception among others might make this video turn people away from Toki Pona rather than find interest in it. I've been speaking Toki Pona for a year and I run an international Toki Pona language exchange community in VR, where plenty of fluent speakers attend. I would love to invite you to chat sometime if you are interested in fixing the video.
Well said, thank you. Grammar errors are easy to identify and correct, but this type of misrepresentation is far more damaging.
In my opinion, the misrepresentation begins even earlier in the video. At th-cam.com/video/_d6bGAw5yt8/w-d-xo.html he says that toki pona is the language of good because it's super hard to whine with only 120 words, but it's wrong. It's easy to complain and express complex negative feelings in toki pona once you understand what is happening to you
i love how people here seem to think of themselves as intellectuals for having learned a toy language...
@@namenloss730 bro mad that their precious TH-cam channel made a bad video and people are calling them out for it lmao.
@@janNowa lol, I really don't give much of a crap about this channel, it has occasionaly fun anecdotes at best.
You are one of several hundreds with a name in toni poka here. I'm guessing a group of on the spectrum redditers shared the link to come here to defend their toy.
I hope it makes you feel special enough on your own to be in that bubble, because nobody outside of your geekdom cares if you speak klingon. (I'm realizing this is insulting to the people who took the time to learn klingon, it's a lot more complexe than your toy)
Gotta love how he explains the basic pronunciation rules and then screws up right after that, I don't even speak the language and noticed a lot of mistakes, that's just impressively little care. It's really funny tho, to the point that I find it a bit charming.
I might just go ahead and learn this language out of curiosity.
It is hilarious how much he got wrong.
Absolutely haha
If you do end up learning, we would be happy to help, most of the community is active on Discord
Want a teacher :D?
do it. doitdoitdoitdoitdoitdoitdoit. sorry i get really enthusiastic whenever someone shows the slightest interest in toki pona anyway i will gladly teach you
as a toki pona speaker, i’m very glad what appears to be every toki pona speaker on the internet has arrived before i did to correct sam on his pronunciation c:
a a a toki sina li lon
The next HAI mistakes video is going to have a 10 minute section just on this episode
I think at this point he's morally obligated to mess up the pronunciation of any language he covers on HAI
who told you 'poki loje lon sinpin li poki tawa' meant bricks are lovely to me?
this means 'face existing red containers are moving containers'
why not just 'kiwen li pona'?
or to be more specific
kiwen tomo li pona mute tawa mi
nimi "leko" li pona tawa mi. taso jan pi ale ala li kepeken nimi ni tan pu ala ona.
mi wile toki e ni: "leko loje li pona tawa mi."
1:07 "each word's first syllable is emphasized"
3:31 "si-TE-len po-na"
lon a,,
This guy should collab with Sam from Jet Lag: The Game
And that guy from the Wendover productions channel too
@@hydrochloricacid2146 i was gonna say that ;-;
Nah, they are too different, wont work.
I think that guy might be too busy trying to keep his iron grip on the state of Maryland
No he shouldn't
jan Sam: these sounds can be pronounced by almost anyone!
Also Sam at 2:30: _moot_
MOOT aaaaaaa
lohe
aiyo
3:15 IYOE
He did say almost. Americans need not apply.
the entire kulupu showed up to dunk on this video, just incredible
lon,,
it's very rare when a main stream person talks about toki pona, so of course
everybody came for the toki pona, stayed for the misinfo
mi ale li lon 😎
This is simultaneously one of your most error-wridden videos and one of the things I am most excited for you to talk about. I kind of hope you take this down and upload a fixed version...
this has more errors than correct translations lmao
a a pakala mute kin ·
waso Keli o, toki!
toki a! :>
kulupu pi toki pona li lon toki anpa a. suwi!
a! waso Keli o! jan Polijan o! palisa jelo Natan o! toki a!
"kipisi sama kama e wile sona" so true bestie
This entire video’s script will be on the errors. I appreciate trying to include us, but please check one of the many dictionaries, discords, websites, forums, etc on information about the language and to learn that Arabic is definitely a phonetic script
900 I can't wait to see what Half as Intelligent gets wrong this time
0:32 Massive pona-fication but yeah
0:43 "Let's start with letters, which are like words but small" (Punches the wall) Dry Humour
1:21 Wait, did he just say "ala" negates the subject. Most of the time when you're using ala, you are negating the verb
1:30 I'll allow the capitalization, since this is someone who has never heard of this lang before
1:48 Pretty sure this is because there wasn't enough enough room up there, but there's also "toki", which means "Hello". There's also "kin" which means "yes" and is functionally the same as "a", and "lon" which also means "yes" but not "kin" or "a"
1:56 Sina, nor sini. This is Oksurn Mk II.
2:30 Changed my mind. This is Oksurn Mk II.
2:32 "To Three and beyond" (Punches the wall). Although, I (personally) would translate "infinity" as "Ale"
2:52 Oh boy I sure hope he doesn't pronounce j as /dʒ/ (English J sound).
"poki lohe" WTF?!
2:57 Also, you forgot "mi". And it's "pona tawa" not "poki tawa". "poki tawa [mi]" means "a box to me"
3:13 Okay, I give up. There's so many things to unpack here. I'm 90% sure you, like many beginners of many languages, just looked through a dictionary and tried to find the words you need
3:36 Arabic uses an abjad. It's an alphabet without vowel letters. It's still phonetic, idiot
4:00 This may seem like HAI standing for Half as Intelligent, but h not being in the TP alphabet is actually a pretty good point. The thing is, say you want to transliterate the name "Masahiro", or "Hawaii" or "Haiyi", You'd have to do it like "Masailo" or "Awai" or "Aji". But two vowels next to each other is not allowed in Toki Pona, and the syllable "ji" isn't allowed either".
4:29 "In case you were interested in making Minecraft Borderline Unplayable" (Punches the wall, the ceiling, the floor, a brick, a potato, a Lamborghini and HAI)
4:55 (Punches the aforementioned objects again)
The Arabic writing system is phonetic. It has phonograms that represent individual sounds, not logograms that represent morphemes or words like Chinese
In fact, most logograms still contain pronunciation hints, because the number of morphemes in logograms is so large that a hybrid system must be used to deal with the problem of word formation and pronunciation hints.
It is estimated that 75%~90% of Chinese characters have pronunciation prompts.
@@user-vt9bp2ei1w True! I knew many characters included radicals that indicated pronunciation, but I didn't know it was that high a percentage. My main point is just that the Arabic alphabet is the same type of writing system as the Latin alphabet, and not like the nonalphabetic Chinese system.
"so you can take a break from learning with a little bit of learning" lol most accurate statement about MIT
Also autism, at least in my own experience being autistic. My idea of relaxing is writing a paper trying to synthesize a distinctly pagan vision of transhumanism at 2 AM.
1:48 nimi sin li lon: pakola!
pakola (interjection): to make a mistake in the same way that Half as Interesting did at 1:48 on their video on toki pona.
a a nasa. nimi sin ni li ken nasa pona. tan ona li sama nimi "toma" li sama nimi "suke"
There are quite a few mistranslations here, I'm going to point a few out:
technically, toki comes from Tok Pisin "tok", though that word is derived from English talk, so... good enough I suppose.
1:29, 1:55, 2:16, words aren't capitalized in toki pona, unless they are loan words.
1:55 "Sini" should be "sina," also pilin should probably be pronounced more like "pee-leen" (or just /pilin/ in IPA), though its technically not wrong to say it that way, just very English-y.
2:28 mute is pronounced "mu-tey," no silent e's in toki pona. Also, there are kinda more numbers (ala can mean zero, luka can mean both hand and five, mute can mean specifically 20, and ale/ali can mean 100), but they are still pretty frustrating to use and its often just better to avoid them if you can.
2:52 "j" in toki pona is pronounced like English y. Also, this sentence doesn't really make sense. "poki loje lon sinpin li poki tawa" would mean something like "the red box in the wall is a moving-box."
What you probably want is either "mi olin e poki loje lon sinpin" (I love red boxes in the wall) or "poki loje lon sinpin li pona tawa mi" (red boxes in the wall are good to me/in my opinion)
3:13 your pronunciation is still pretty off, especially with ijo (should be pronounced more like ee-yo), and the word order is a bit confusing again. "suwi telo wawa kepeken namako en kule ijo kasi" means "strong/energetic wet sugar using spice and natural thing-color."
For the intended phrase, you'd probably want "telo suwi wawa kepeken namako kepeken kule pi kasi kiwen" which would roughly be "sweet energetic drink using spice and using the color of a hard plant (a.k.a. wood)"
3:30 sitelen should emphasize the first syllable. "SEE-te-len," not "see-TE-len." also, sitelen pona also could just mean "good writing," since pona means both.
3:35 Arabic does have a phonetic system of writing. It uses an abjad, which is basically just an alphabet without letters for vowels. for another logography, you'd probably want to look at Egyptian heiroglyphs.
3:57 While yes, you can spell out "s-a-m", proper names have to be changed to fit toki pona's syllable structure, which can be tricky. Also, proper nouns are always adjectives that you have to put onto another word, like "jan" for people. Instead of "jan Sam", it'd have to be "jan San" or "jan Samu" or something like that. For HAI, you could possibly do something like "kulupu Eseja" to approximate the sound, or "kulupu pi musi lili" (group "a little interesting", or something like that)
4:05 I'm pretty sure toki pona has a few native speakers, or at least attempts, since people have spoken it around children as they've grown up! Sure, those children also know another language usually, but it is a bit more complicated.
While there are quite a few mistakes here, it's still really nice making a video about the language! Hopefully it'll get people interested in learning the language, which is always great! If anyone wants to come try learning the language, I'd definitely recommend it! It is honestly fairly simple to get started, the community is really nice and friendly, and its pretty fun trying to use the limited vocabulary to translate things.
Well anyways, mi tawa! o pali e tenpo pona!
oh, i also missed "pakola," which should be "pakala"
@@syro33 a a · pakala musi ·
@@casperdewith a toki, jan Kasape o! :>
@@mamusipipalisajelo5419 jan ale pi toki pona li kama lon poki sitelen anpa pi sitelen tawa ni anu seme a a a
@@trubiso lon aa
while laso can mean blue it can also mean green or any colours in between. Cool to see a video on a language I love but god some of the errors hurt.
hello fluent speaker of toki pona here, there is a lot of misinformation in this video please do your own research and ask speakers, half as interesting says a lot of things that aren’t true
tbh maybe i should make a reaction video and correct it berhthjbt
Agreed. He’s gonna have to make a long “corrections” video most likely
mi pilin sama a! sitelen ni li ike tawa mi. taso mi pilin e ni: jan mute li kama sona li wile sona e toki epiku ni. tan ni la mi pilin ike lili tawa ona.
translation: I absolutely agree! I dislike this video, but I think that it exposes many people to this awesome language and many people might want to learn it. That's why I don't dislike it as much.
@@kaitschu mi kin. Mi wile e ni: jan sin li kulupu e kulupu pi toki pona tan ni. Tr: agreed. I hope more people come to toki pona because of this.
@@lipamanka a a a o ni a! jan mute mute (mi en jan Kasape en jan Kekan San en jan Mika en jan Inari en jan ante kin a) li alasa toki e pakala ale lon toki anpa pi sitelen tawa ni. taso sina pali e sitelen tawa la ni li ken pona suli.
I know about 30 words so far. I really enjoy toki pona. My favorite sentence so far is "soweli meli li lili"
you're doing really well so far!
"Female terrestrial mammal is small."
@@ms.aelanwyr.ilaicos yeah, I read it as "The female animal is small". I like it because there are so many "li"s.
yeah, keep practicing, as toki pona is so fun. mi kepeken toki pona lon tenpo ale.
@@janPolijan sina toki jan seme
His next mistakes video is basically just gonna be about this.
😭 as a waso pi toki pona, this video pains me immensely. videos like these, which clearly have no research done beyond the bare minimum, doom new learners by giving them expectations and heaps of incorrect information. toki pona can't be learned efficiently in a day; some learners are still making discoveries about it years into their learning process. it's not that hard to consult with community members about these things; as many other fellow toki pona speakers have already pointed out everything wrong with this video in particular, you can see that, as a community, we're very enthusiastic and more than willing to aid in the process of making things like this :'( the community deserves better than this 😭
if you dont listen to the entire toki pona community dunking on you for this video idk what to tell you. i dont even really speak it myself but there are too many mistakes to count and most of them are blatantly obvious to anyone with even a small amount of exposure to actual speakers. it seems more like you made this entire video in a day, without bothering to contact anyone who actually knew anything about toki pona in the process lol
He really was being very meta, demonstrating what toki pona learned in a day is like
90% of this year's mistakes video will be just this video.
0:33 You joke, but that actually was the point. The zen practice or happiness through simplicity.
As someone who subscribes to quite a few TP TH-cam channels, I had to do a double take when I realised this was uploaded by HAI and not one of them. Overall, a good overview, but there are some small errors, as some others have pointed out:
1:29 All words should be lowercase, except proper nouns (names).
1:48 'pakola' should be 'pakala'.
1:54 'sini' should be 'sina'.
2:14 While not entirely wrong, it's a little more complicated. Politeness is assumed to be the default; impoliteness can just be expressed through words. It's of course not as complicated as something like English, but that's true with basically everything.
2:24 'While these are the only words that can *only* refer to numbers or amounts, there are other words that people use to refer to numbers (ala = 0, luka = 5, ale/ali = 100).
2:30 'mute' is pronounced 'moo-tay'. Every vowel in TP is pronounced, unlike English.
2:55 I'm going to be honest, I have no idea what you've written here. 'poki' refers to a container, not just something box-shaped. Leko would be more accurate. I also assume the second 'poki' was supposed to be 'pona'. However, I would rephrase this completely as just 'mi olin e leko loje' - 'I love red blocks'. The word olin literally just means 'love'.
3:16 Pretty good, but 'suwi' should come after the word 'telo', as adjectives come after nouns, and 'kule ijo kasi' should be 'kule pi ijo kasi' because of confusing grammar regarding adjectives and adverbs that nobody really understands. Also, 'en' refers to subjects. 'kule' is not a subject, but an adjective, so it should be more like 'telo suwi wawa pi kule pi ijo kasi (kepeken) namako', but even here, 'kepeken' is unnecessary, though not technically incorrect - 'sweet powerful liquid with caffeine' is valid, but it's easier to just say 'sweet powerful caffeinated liquid', especially in TP where it just required the removal of the word 'kepeken instead of completely changing the word order. Other than that, I'd probably describe it in a bit less detail, such as 'telo wawa pimeja' (black, strong liquid) is probably good enough. Despite my paragraph-long rambling, though, it was still understandable.
3:30 'sitelen' should be pronounced as 'SI-te-len', not 'si-TE-len'. Stress always falls on the first syllable.
Still really appreciate people talking about this language though. It's great, and the community is one of my favourites online.
> but 'suwi' should come before the word 'telo', as adjectives come before nouns
this is wrong, adjectives in toki pona come after the noun
> mi olin e leko loje
if you affectionately love bricks, why don't you marry them /j
but seriously, olin is AFFECTIONATE love. "leko loje li pona mute tawa mi" or "leko loje li pona suli tawa mi" would be better
@@brianush1668 quite right, my bad. I meant to say it the other way around.
@@brianush1668 i think they just got it backwards. in the video suwi came before telo anyway.
also with the video, kepeken does not mean "alongside". it means "using"
"en" only means "and" in the subject
so yeah, it's "telo suwi wawa pi namako kasi pi kule pi kiwen kasi" or probably just "(moku) telo namako (pimeja)"
3:40 I will now be using "Pictionary" for a dictionary with logographic/ideographic scripts
guys, we found him... b gilson
Simplicity is pretty much the whole point of Toki Pona. You aren't supposed to worry about the specifics. Part of what makes the language so attractive for many is that it is this simplicity that lets users of the language not concern themselves with needing to hyper-specify every little thing.
Going to the coffee shop and ordering a caramel macchiato could be as easy as saying
"sina o pali e telo pimeja tawa mi. mi wile telo pimeja lon sewi li telo walo. kepeken o telo ko suwi"
Or
"You, make dark/brown liquid (coffee) for me. I want dark liquid (espresso) on top of white liquid (milk). Use sticky sweet liquid (caramel)!
Apologies to any tokiponists who actually know the language in a usable fashion, but I just wanted to demonstrate that communicating ideas in toki pona isn't difficult, it just takes context and a different way of thinking about the world.
there is soooooo much wrong with this, coming from someone actually learning the language
Bro being fluent in toki pona while watching this video makes me feel like I'm "having a stroke"
kon pi pan seli li lon.
It has never been more clear that the person writing and the person reading the scripts are not the same lol
a a lon,,
Can’t wait to see this video featured multiple times when he does his next recap of mistakes
this will be the only video featured in the mistakes thing
lon a a
As a tokiponist his pronunciations HURT dkdndjddn
Just a few important ones - 'mute' is pronounced more like 'moot-ayy' (no silent letters) and the letter J in TP is pronounced like the english letter Y - 'loje' is 'low-yay'
Also by the way toki pona isn't ambiguous, it's VAGUE. Ambiguity is when you can't tell the difference between two possible meanings 9f a sentence. Toki pona's words all have specific definitions, but those definitions are broader than any natural language.
every single jan pi toki pona found this video and went
"bombastic side eye."
"CRIMINAL OFFENSIVE SIDE EYE."
also kepeken namako keeps me up at night
through the spicy use
The fact that Half as Interesting could have contacted any one of the many commenters here that are prolific members of the online Toki Pona community (and thus easy to find via the ma pona discord or the official subreddit) and fixed 90% of the errors in a single script run-through-cmon man.
Literally I'm sure most of us would have happily written the entire video at no charge, or at the very least completely reworked the script while keeping the same structure and writing style
another mistake i'm not seeing pointed out: "luka" means five, (or hand, think five fingers), but is not listed at 2:24. any number can be expressed by breaking said number down into these parts, thirteen becomes luka luka tu wan. notably, "ale" is also a common stand-in for 100, but there's less of a consensus there (some people understand it to mean 1000, and i mean like, come on.) nevertheless, toki pona isn't meant for dealing with large numbers, just as arithmetic isn't meant for poetry.
but jaku means 100 and ale means 1000
2:54 "At walls, red containers are moving containers."
3:19 "Energetic liquid sweetness with embellishment, and plant object color."
I think he doesn’t know about the new word “leko” which means “square” or “cube”, and instead he is using “poki”. The word leko is not in the toki pona book, so I think it’s understandable why he used “poki”.
So better sentence might be:
“leko loje tomo li pona tawa mi” Red blocks of buildings is good to me
using "poki" for leko is a weird calque. i wonder why not just kiwen.
if this is how accurate your other videos are i cant watch your channel anymore
hey sam! im not sure where you got your information for this video, but most of it is very flawed, misleading, or just dead wrong, from the facts to the translations to the pronunciations. i know you mean well, and as much as i appreciate you putting a spotlight onto the language, i'm concerned about the effects your incorrect information may have on people seeking to learn the language. some of my fellow tokiponists have left comments explaining the errors in detail, and I sincerely hope you take a look at those. i am awaiting the corrections video :)
Today must be jan Misali's favourite day
jan misali's favourite day is when community captions come
@@notwithouttext a a a
For people who can speak toki pona, this video is hilarious but not in the way Sam intended lol.
(jan pi toki pona la, sitelen tawa ni li musi mute a! taso, jan San li wile ala e musi ni a!)
This is proof you shouldn't make a video after scanning a wikipedia page real quick.
My fellow tokiponists...
I would rather have a popular channel like this create a video with a positive attitude about the language and community we love than ignore us.
If we criticize creators when they make mistakes but work in good faith it reflects badly on us.
Be pona.
i feel like that's the problem though. this would be fine if he only got a few things wrong, but this is so blatantly lazy that it's clear he didn't really try.
If you are seriously interested in toki pona, I would recommend jan Misali’s videos about the language. Tbh this video seems under-researched and rushed
2:30 "Mute" is pronounced as "moo-tay" not "moot". Every letter is pronounced in Toki Pona
Using overly lengthy noun phrases goes against the philosophy of Toki Pona. It's a language meant to keep things simple and minimalist, so it's perfectly fitting that describing things in detail is difficult and clunky.
the man somehow got everything he said wrong in some way
I’ve tried playing Minecraft in Toki Pona & it’s actually pretty great, except that they haven’t translated a lot of their unique words (like Redstone, Creeper, End, or Piglin).
Hi, one of the people that contibute to Minecraft translations into Toki Pona here. It's because terms like "Redstone" are trademarked and cannot be changed due to Mojang rules. But yeah I primarily play Minecraft in Toki Pona and it's great!
there's a resource pack that fixes that!!
@@_Mikarific_ oh geez... really? that sucks. TIL.
lichens also has Toki Pona support, hopefully much more things will too bc Toki Pona has an ISO code, "tok"
I think your next mistakes video should be entirely dedicated to this video, maybe get jan Misali in there
If you dare to show this video to Conlang Critic, he will rate it below Vötgil.
toki! I am a speaker of toki pona and I would like to point out a few inconsistencies about your video.
Just out of the gate, I would like to say that the "120 words" metric isn't that accurate. As of jan Sonja's "The Toki Pona Dictionary," there is now more like 137 words, including the ku suli. It is not wrong to say it has 120 words, but it is not complete.
Secondly, the 30 hours, while not a terrible metric, has questionable sources at best, and was written by people not very ingrained in the community. This is kind of nitpicky but it needs to be said.
Also, you passively said that the consonants were based on English but there are some issues with this. First, consonants like p, t, and k are often aspirated in English, but this is canonically incorrect pronunciation. Also, j, is pronounced as English "y," and so this isn't very accurate. A better way to say is to be "The consonants and vowels are pronounced approximately like those in Indonesian."
When you are discussing how you say "how are you doing," you use the word "sini" instead of "sina." Also, it is customary to not capitalize the first letter of the sentence, which you do throughout the entire video.
Also, when you said "there is no way to specify politeness," this really isn't that accurate. toki pona is assumed to be polite unless specifically specifying otherwise. While there may not be direct ways to translate phatic expressions, you can construct these in context. For example, if you helped me understand a concept in my math class, I could say "sina pona tawa mi tan pana sona" which literally translates to "you are good in the perspective of me because the giving of knowlege," or "You are good to me because you taught me." Basically, I am saying that phatic expressions are highly context dependent, and thus to say there isn't really a way to express them is kind of ignorant.
Your segment on numbers described numbers without mentioning the various nasin nanpa-s that exist. For example, using wan (1), tu (2), luka (5), mute (20), and ale (100), you can make numbers like 34 (mute luka luka tu tu), or 65 (mute mute mute luka), or a bunch of other numbers. Also, you said "moot" for mute instead of "moo-tay"
Also, your segment on "coffee" wasn't very accurate. While to completely remove ambiguity you have to make long phrases, context removes a lot of this. If it is the morning and you say you are at starbucks, saying something like "I am drinking a black coffee with foam," you could say "mi moku e telo pimeja e ko suwi," or "I consume the black liquid and sweet semisolid" which should get the point across.
About your short mention of names, you forgot to mention a common practice dubbed tokiponization, which is when you edit your name to fit toki pona phonetics. My name, for example, Wyatt, could be approximated using "Waja." another example is Sebastian, which could be "Sapasan" or "Sapasin." This is often left to the person you are talking to, so theoretically you could use a completely unrelated name to be referred to. You also should have mentioned the cartouches and headnouns used for names.
When talking about AI, you suggest that AI are good at recognizing speech patterns in toki pona. However, this does not mean they are good at recognizing it. Artificial Intelligence is notoriously bad at context. And, since toki pona is highly context dependent, this makes it very hard to get an AI to understand the full depth of meaning that toki pona has.
Also, lastly, you forgot to mention that the discord communities existed. Communities like ma pona pi toki pona or kama sona are not only important to the community, but popular places to come to learn toki pona. If you're going to mention the reddit and facebook communities, the discord communities should not be left out. You should also look into the telegram groups that house the non-english-speaking population of toki pona.
And with that, I bid farewell.
mi tawa!
I feel this would be a great thing to learn before learning another language, it starts by getting people used to the concept of leaning/remembering different terms
I can't wait for the HAI corrections video lol
(kulupu HAI li pali e sitelen tawa. sitelen tawa wan li toki e ni: kulupu HAI li pakala mute. mi wile lukin e ona a!)
toki! mi jan Kikili. this is outdated lol
0:00 "toki! nimi mi li (something). sina sona ala sona?" you don't have to, but it's better to pronounce the vowels as most of the toki pona community does. i say that because toki pona is owned by the community, hot to jan Sonja.
0:15 this depends, the essential word count is 137, but there are many many more words created by the community that people decide if they want to use them or not. i use "isipin" for example.
0:21 may take a little longer.
0:33 due to toki pona's simplistic style, as that is its goal, it can mean good talk, good language, good speech, simple talk, simple language, simple speech, or even peaceful chatter!
1:20 you can use existing words like "tenpo pini" and "tenpo lon" and "tenpo kama" for tenses, "meli", "mije", and "tonsi" for genders, and "wan", "tu", "luka", "mute", and "ale" for numbers.
1:30 you do not capitalise the beginning of toki pona sentences. those are used for proper nouns instead.
1:47 pakala, not pakola
1:57 sina, not sini. this would be a good time to touch on the pronunciations of letters. all letters are pronounced exactly like the IPA.
k,l,m,n,p,s,t,w are exactly the same as in english.
j is english y.
a = ah
e = eh
i = ee
o = aw
u = oo
these are the most widely accepted pronunciations of letters.
2:14 toki pona is polite by default.
2:17 you can use pona, sina pona, or pona tawa sina.
2:27 actually the existing words for hand, many, and everything, or luka, mute, and ale, can mean 5, 20(or anything >2), and 100(or infinity) respectively.
2:30 moo-teh or even moo-tay not moot
2:51 you can simply use leko loje li poka tawa mi.
2:52 law-yay not low-hey. j is english y, remember?
2:54 do you mean "poki loje lon sinpin li pona tawa mi"?
3:40 those are only the 120 nimi pu. don't forget the other 17 nimi ku suli!
3:59 normally when you want to tokiponise your name, you make it based on the pronunciation, not the letters. so "sam" would be "jan San" or "jan Sen" because m is not allowed as a nasal at the end of a word.
4:07 there are a few.
hope this helps! tawa pona!
a!
@@notwithouttext i hope this gets into the corrections video
@@kekevids134 lon a
an isipin user? get well soon
/lh
@@temmiemew a a lon a
they beating your monsi in the comments rn
Thanks for covering this language! The complete point of Toki Pona is to force you to think about everything you want to say. It teaches you to think simple. That's not a disadvantage, but the reason many people use it in their everyday life. You have to break everything down to under 130 concepts.
I'd argue it's "simplistic" rather than "simple". What it actually does is throw away a lot of information. In your head you might think you're distilling your ideas to the most relevant base concepts, but when you're trying to communicate to other people, other people will not share your state of mind and will not understand your collection of concepts in the same way. From what I can see, it is nightmarishly painful to express any kind of nuance, or any exotic concepts beyond the average everyday conversation, or most things with exact specificity when context hasn't already been established.
Or maybe you can prove me wrong. I'll give some examples of things, and you can tell me how to say them in toki pona:
- Concerned but not panicked, as in the ideal reaction to a looming pandemic, i.e. taking necessary caution to protect oneself but not overreacting (for expressing nuance)
- Ohm's Law, that the electrical voltage and current across a component is directly proportional to the component's electrical resistance (as an exotic concept)
- Acetaminophen, the pain relieve medicine (as a specific thing. Imagine it's your doctor writing a prescription note and they'll send it to a pharmacist. The doctor and pharmacist have never seen each other.)
@@letao12 you are right, but you rarely need to be so specific in everyday life. I have heard that this language works well in real life situations where the context is clear, like eating on a table. It is a language for personal contact not for science or business.
@@letao12
- "monsuta lili", or "pilin ike lili": a little scared
- I don't understand Ohm's Law in English, so I couldn't describe it in toki pona. if I wanted to refer to it, I might call it "sona suli pi jan Ohm": important knowledge from the person named Ohm
- "misikeke Acetaminophen", or "moku Acetaminophen": medicine called acetaminophen
@@stefang5639 What you say is sensible. My problem is when a language can only be used in casual situations, then it's essentially a toy language that cannot ever be mainstream.
@@KelseyHigham
- "A little scared" isn't accurate. "Concerned" is a rational behavior, recognizing and preparing for a potential danger but not having fear of it. "Scared" is an emotional reaction. This precisely reflects my issue with lack of nuance.
- Which fields of study are you familiar with? How about this from recent news, "An American research lab successfully achieved nuclear fusion of deuterium atoms with positive energy gain".
- So Acetaminophen isn't said using toki pona at all. It's just the English word. This basically proves specific things can't be readily expressed in toki pona.
as a toki pona speaker, mi unpa e mama sina
no you won't
sina pakala e mi 😔
this may be the most ive ever been disappointed. tokipona is a passion to so many including myself and to see such a large youtuber make a video on it was so exciting until a few seconds in when i realized this may very well be the worst researched informative video online, with the lest quality assurance and double checking as well. Truly a disappointment and i can say ive never cringed this bad. Just read the comments section to get an idea of the mistakes its a fair train wreck when you realize how few talking points he had to get right and still couldn't manage it. Obviously he is not the only one working this channel and there are script writer editors and researchers who all share some blame. this is a great language to talk about and im glad he tried to get the word out i just wished he cared enough to check his work, maybe send a script draft to a tokipona group.
new radio shows?
new radio shows?
new radio shows?
new radio shows?
new radio shows?
new radio shows?
0:45 actually that's where things are starting to get difficult --- it heavily relies on grammar, phrases etc. --- the same way brainfuck isn't actually a simple computer language just because it has 8 instructions
Brainfuck's actually a really good comparison
Toki Pona (yes, I capitalized it, fight me) is basically a language of circumlocutions you essentially have to paraphrase everything). It's really well designed for what it is, but it's definitely not intended to be an international medium of communication or anything like that.
toki pona is lowercase in toki pona, but it can be capitalized in english
imo it can be international, but just not a "used by everybody instead of their own language"
hi, i came here to fight your capitals. ha ha ha, of course not, i'm just kidding, it's fine, ale li pona! i think one can say most stuff in not-so-many words after one is really accustomed to toki pona. (i use toki pona a lot here on my youtube channel.)
@@notwithouttext yeah maybe for use in taxis or other short term interactions
Yeah, as an IAL like everyone thinks of those, a culturally neutral replacement for English in business and science, Toki Pona wouldn’t work. I don’t think it’s overly circumlocutous in more common settings, tho.
my favorite toki pona number: "mut". i appreciate the effort, but wow....
i don't even think there was effort! im like 98% sure they used glosbe, which basically any tokiponist would tell you is a shit idea!
@@qwertyuiop.lkjhgfdsa that's valid a a a
literally moot point smh
1 2 moout kek