mi toki lili e toki pona

It's probably not surprising, given that we've been watching jan Misali's YouTube channel for years, but we've been following along on the toki pona language course they're doing with jan Kesi and practicing with flashcards and, recently, starting in on lipu sona pona by jan Lentan so we have more material. And making more flashcards because sitelen pona, the logography jan Sonja kicked off for the language.

It's been an interesting process, even if we're flagging a bit right now - toki pona feels like it'll bring out the poets in us. If you don't know, it's a minimalist language - less than two hundred words - and to talk of most things you must combine ... but the combinations are deliberately not standardized. Instead, the word for a concept is built out of how the speaker describing it right now conceives of it. And that makes it really interesting to ask questions like "what is Dwarf Fortress? what is a roleplaying game? what is a story?", because we have to think about it to talk about it. jan toki li pali e toki. jan toki li pali e toki ale.