lipu sona

https://lipu-sona.kittycat.homes

in 2022 i made a course that covers my style of toki pona. lots of people use it, and it's even been translated into three other languages! it's pretty cool

backstory

i made this one in 2022! toki pona is one of my special interests, and i really wanted to share it w my girlfriend. but i realized one huge problem: no good toki pona courses existed! there were several courses out at the time, but i had problems with all of them

my problem with the course that i personally used (jan Misali's 12 days of toki pona) was that it sort of just skipped, like, important grammatical rules? i didn't know what a preverb was until several months after i had finished the course! the way the course explains preverbs like "wile" literally actively impeded my ability to understand that preverbs were a thing, because jan Misali explained it as "you don't need e after wile because it's an indirect object", which like, no? thats wrong.

anyways, i don't really fault jan Misali for that. they set a goal to make an entire toki pona course in only 12 days, of course the episodes are gonna be rushed. but there was no way i could recommend it to my girlfriend.

the other big course at the time was jan Lentan's lipu sona pona. for a while, i thought this one was good because everyone recommended it, and i was planning on teaching my girlfriend toki pona using this course. but then i read it. and, its not like theres anything wrong with it, its just... jan Lentan's course focuses on teaching the learner as many different styles as possible. if different people have different styles when it comes to the topic of the lesson, jan Lentan will tell you about all of them! and sometimes they might even overstate how common certain niche stylistic choices are.

my problem with this is really just that i don't think it's the right approach to teaching. i prefer to teach one style, and teach it well, and then the learner should be encouraged to experiment themselves after they understand the fundamentals.

and that's why i made my own course! i wanted one that focused on teaching you one possible style of toki pona (specifically, i went for a mix of my own style and the official toki pona book's style), a course that doesn't gloss over important topics, while still being concise.

today, my course is luckily not the only course i like. i also like mun Kekan San's course. i think the nice thing is that mun Kekan San's approach to teaching is the polar opposite to my conciseness, and i think that's good! some people will want long explanations of things, others will want concise explanations. mun Kekan San doesn't fall into pitfalls of overexplaining niche styles, and instead spends a lot of time explaining the important stuff.

design goals for my course

when i started making my course, i tried to be deliberate in how i constructed it. i wanted the order the lessons were placed in, and the order the words were taught in, to help the learner as much as possible. i start with teaching the most basic sentence structures, and then slowly cover more and more advanced topics. i also weighed each lesson's importance vs. its difficulty, and i tried to avoid having a lot of very difficult lessons in a row. when i picked which words should be taught in each lesson, i tried to make sure to pick words that were related to the lesson topic somehow. for example, when teaching about direct objects, i included obvious transitive verbs like "to love", and "to build". i also tried to make sure that words which would be easier for english speakers to remember the meaning of, were spread out evenly among all the courses.

for the actual lessons, my goal was to cover everything, but cover it concisely. this was mostly because i thought that's what would work best for my girlfriend, but also because i prefer writing shorter explanations. when i write long explanations i feel like i'm just repeating the same stuff over and over again.

i made sure to include a lot of example sentences to make up for the brevity, and tried to make them visually interesting. i mark relevant parts of speech in the toki pona sentence and the english translation, so it's easier to understand the connection. not everyone knows what a direct object is, so i hoped this might help grasp the concept easier.