explaining toki pona grammar with tea

imagine this: the weather is good today, so we want to take tea out onto our porch and sit in the fresh air. let's talk toki pona grammar.

this essay exists because we, while we've been learning, have been very frustrated about not being able to translate things, and we couldn't translate because we didn't know how the words went together. this probably isn't gonna solve that problem for you, but it hopefully means you've at least met all the constructions and you know they exist.

we are not as of this writing fluent, so many thanks to our beta readers, including Russ Sharek of The Circus Freaks, @f00fc7c8@kind.social, and various members of the kama sona Discord. any remaining errors and eccentricities are our own.

first line is in toki pona.

second line is a word-by-word gloss in english (spaces separate toki pona words) with grammatical particles in square brackets and prepositions in curly braces.
third line is a somewhat-literal english translation. (obvious example: singletons saying an unmodified 'mi' probably mean "me" - the actual toki pona word does not indicate number.)

the rest are commentary.

let's go.

( long (~2.3k words), content warning for mentions of food and health )