Learning Toki Pona through comprehensible input
Toki Pona is a minimalist constructed language.
This means it’s an entirely made up language which didn’t naturally evolved like other languages. This is different than a code which obscures an existing language. A language allows for a completely different way of thinking. A language has its own grammar, morphology, phonology, etc. Toki Pona was created by Sonja Lang all the way back in the 2000s. Since then it’s grown a passionate community of speakers. The idea behind the language is to express the core truths of life simply without over complicating things. Thus the language only has around 150 words.
If you wanted to actually learn Toki Pona through comprehensible input, natural immersion, or are just familiar with Krashen’s input hypothesis and want to test it out, you might be surprised to find there is hypothetically enough content in Toki Pona to do so. One of the biggest problems with learning languages through natural immersion is there isn’t sufficient amounts of content or appropriate content for languages that are obscure or unpopular to learn. This is why it’s so amazing and surprising that a tiny language with a tiny community might have enough content to do this.
The YouTube series “O Pilin E Toki Pona” provides great training wheels to begin immersion from absolutely zero. Jan Telekoman, the creator of the series, has created over 10 hours of content to consume for beginners with no knowledge of the language that you can sit back and watch. Ten hours is enough comprehensible input to make significant progress in the language. I estimate that with maybe a total of 100 hours you would be completely fluent in the language.
Right after watching all 10+ hours of Jan Telekoman’s beginner content you’re able to move on to content that isn’t as geared towards absolute beginners. Here is one place to start after finishing all of Jan Telokoman’s videos in Toki Pona:
There might be enough content here alone to hit 100 hours. Even 100 hours might be overkill, but I wanted to come up with an estimate where if you hit it then no matter what you should be fluent. In other words, that’s a very safe estimate in my opinion.