studying toki pona with many different sources

[packbat]

(mi kama sona e toki pona kepeken lipu mute)

(I think.)

There are other reasons why it's taking us ages to learn a hundred and twenty words and how to use them, but part of it is like the old joke: someone with one watch always knows what time it is, but someone with two watches is never sure.

Which is to say: jan Misali analyzes "x li y" as a subject x performing an intransitive verb y ... but because the same content words function in both roles, you could just as easily analyze it as a copula: x is y, as both jan Lentan and jan Sonja do. And jan Lentan analyses the 'kepeken ala' in "o kepeken ala ilo ike" as a verb used without 'e', but jan Sonja analyzes it as a preposition. The same sentence, understood the same way, but analyzed very differently.

And it's ... good? Like, we are much better off watching jan Misali and jan Kesi's videos and reading jan Lentan's lipu sona pona and referencing jan Sonja's official books and getting feedback from speakers and looking up articles on the Internet than we would be doing only one of those things, but we feel much more strain, trying to develop our own interpretations in a mess of other peoples'.

We're almost halfway through lipu sona pona, though. We need to learn numbers, learn pre-verbs, learn 'la', learn 'pi', learn sixty-ish more words. And read, and write, and converse.