packbat | Aesop is pretty good for toki pona practice

So, you might not know this, but this guy Aesop wrote a bunch of flash fiction back in the day. It's not all good - the casual denigration of foxes and wolves is wholly unwarranted, and also there's a lot of animal death - but there's some interesting observations about how people behave in there, and quite a bit of humor in stories like "The Charcoal-Burner and the Fuller" and "The Fisherman Piping". Maybe not laugh-out-loud humor, but if he were on Tumblr in 2023 he'd have followers.

They're also relatively easy to translate into toki pona.

Actually, they fit toki pona really well.

Like, you read a story, you get a sense of the point of it, and then you think about how to convey that. There's little technical jargon and a lot of the details don't matter - the joke works just as well if it's oxen pulling a wagon or a donkey pulling a chariot - so you can be very flexible and casual with your wording. There's a handful that are really famous - "The Fox and the Grapes", "The North Wind and the Sun", "The Mice in Council" - but there's almost three hundred of these things. You're not gonna run out unless you're really, really determined to.

It's easy and fun and you get to find some weird stories you (probably, I don't know) never read before. And then tell them again.

(I think "jan Isa" would be the most obvious translation of the English translation of Aesop, but apparently back in the day he was called Αἴσωπος - Aísōpos. As the cover art for our toki pona name guide suggests, we tokiponize that as "jan Isopo".)