this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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Toki Pona for Socialists
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This is a Toki Pona community for socialists to chat, make art, and share their experiences with the Toki Pona constructed language!
Toki Pona is a philosophical artistic constructed language created by Sonja Lang in 2001. It is designed for talking about things by explaining them in simple terms. When the first official book released it had only 120 words, and since then has expanded to somewhere around 140 words!
As of the 2022 Toki Pona census there was around 1800+ speakers of the language. It's primarily spoken online and is considered one of the most popular conlangs (constructed languages) in the world.
Despite being a constructed language Toki Pona is a real language and is recognized by several institutions around the world!
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There are so many Chinese characters to learn. O_O I am trying to stay focused mostly on the most common ones for now, through apps, to cover the most useful ground. Grammar is also challenging in its own way and to work on that, I've been using an app called TalkMe. I think I mentioned trying some other similar apps, somewhere on the grad, but this is the one I've been using lately; it uses AI for conversation to help with practicing it. I take it with a grain of salt cause AI can make errors more so than a fluent human, but it gives me a reason to put stuff I'm learning into practice instead of trying to convince my brain it's important to remember stuff I never use.
It's one of the reasons I'm learning, so pretty important.
Green Snake and Super Me, which I watched with subtitles. Super Me is a pretty interesting premise, writer who blurs the line between real world and dream.
When I studied Mandarin, I found it really beneficial to practice hand writing as a way to ingrain each character into my brain. Learning them visually and typing them can be fine for some people, but I found that practicing hand writing to be much, much better for memorization. Even a decade later, I can still remember the meanings of most characters, even if I have forgotten their pronunciation.
To paraphrase an old teacher of mine, "writing characters is similar to doing Tai Chi, the movements to create the characters are as symbolic as the written characters themselves, how we write carries as much meaning as what we write."
Everyone learns differently, so this might not be as helpful for you as it was for me, but best of luck! 好好学习天天向上！
Thank you! 谢谢！
It is something I've considered, but haven't found the right circumstances to keep up at that kind of repetition habitually. Some apps have character writing and I have a stylus with my phone, so that's already close to doing it by hand and then I can do it over and over without having to worry about paper and the like. But the lack of novelty in it makes it difficult for me to stick with—very likely have ADHD of a kind and so one of the ways I keep myself learning is by introducing new/novel alongside other learning. Sometimes that has taken the form of dipping into another language on top of Mandarin, sometimes I've done it by going through a whole new app's course different from one I've tried before; currently doing that via LingoDeer's Mandarin course and also because I wanted to find another app to have a "home base" for study after HelloChinese made some moves I didn't like.
Oh also, I came across this app Chinese Deciphered, which is along the lines of digging into meaning and construction of characters. I think using it to look up characters in detail is a similar principle to the repetition of writing them, in that it puts the focus on each component of the character, not just what they look like at a glance. Though I imagine writing probably has cognitive benefit that other stuff just doesn't, due to the tactile link.