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Lianne’s Holiday Season with Toki Pona | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Lianne Senior Member Canada thetoweringpile.blog Joined 5115 days ago 284 posts - 410 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Toki Pona, German, French | Message 1 of 14 15 December 2010 at 10:22pm | IP Logged |
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I guess this log is sort of a pre-TAC 2011 warm-up. I'm just finishing up school (one more exam and one more project and I'll be a university grad!), so I finally have a bit of time to spend on language study. Currently my German is in a state where all I'm doing is reviewing whatever Anki cards are due each day, in the hopes that I won't forget too much. So mostly I'm working on Toki Pona and Esperanto. I'll be focusing on all three for TAC 2011.
My main goal for this last bit of 2010 is to learn all the 120ish root words in Toki Pona. My method to this end consists of completing the lessons at toki.co.nr, of which I've completed the first 5 so far. I'm also using Anki, and occasionally even actual paper flashcards, to practice the vocabulary. I'll also work on Esperanto a bit, even though the focus is on Toki Pona. After all, today is Zamenhof day! Which, I must admit, is why I chose to start this log today. It's time for half a month of constructed language fun times! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lianne Senior Member Canada thetoweringpile.blog Joined 5115 days ago 284 posts - 410 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Toki Pona, German, French | Message 2 of 14 17 December 2010 at 12:33am | IP Logged |
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Stupid school, taking up all my time even after classes are done. I'm still working on my final project, so I haven't had a lot of studying time. So, until I have accomplishments to share, I'll lay out the difficulties I'm having, and the mini-goals I'm working towards.
Toki Pona I'm finding that, while I seem to soak up Esperanto vocabulary like a sponge, Toki Pona words sometimes just don't stick. I think it may be because one word can mean so many different things. Mostly I'm having trouble with the ones that start with s (because they're pretty similar). In particular, I tend to mix up seli and suli. So, I made paper flashcards of any words that don't stick. It seems to be helping! Esperanto Lately, I've been focusing on learning vocabulary, using the lists on lernu.net under "words by topic". I've been using word lists to learn them, and it's been going really well! What I really need to work on is learning the correlatives. Some of them are easy to remember, just because they're so common, and translate easily to English, like kiel (how) and tio (that). But there are others that I find much harder to remember. For example, things like Δ‰ial, which means "for every reason". So, I think I need to make a bunch of sentences using each of the correlatives, so I can actually see how they're used. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| thephantomgoat Groupie United States Joined 5471 days ago 52 posts - 103 votes | Message 3 of 14 17 December 2010 at 12:58am | IP Logged |
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I'm excited to follow your log. Toki Pona and Esperanto are the two conlangs that
interest me most (though I don't know when I'll start learning either), and I'm looking forward to reading about your experiences with them. Good luck with your project, and happy studying. Musi pona! :D 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lianne Senior Member Canada thetoweringpile.blog Joined 5115 days ago 284 posts - 410 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Toki Pona, German, French | Message 4 of 14 17 December 2010 at 11:59pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the support! :)
Today I did lesson 6 of Toki Pona. I'm still finding studying difficult, though. I guess it's because school still isn't quite done yet, and I'm still exhausted, more mentally than physically. So I can't seem to do more than one lesson in one sitting, and it takes me forever to get through them. So, today I learned (though not perfectly, yet) 9 new words. The worst of them is lawa. It can be a verb meaning to go or to move, an adjective meaning moving, or a preposition meaning to or for. So I really have to think about a sentence to figure out what lawa means in that context. lon and kepeken are similarly confusing. But at least the simpler sentences are starting to come a little bit easier. I still take about 10 seconds to figure out the meaning of a basic sentence, though. It's the multiple meanings for each word that throws me, I think. I also learned today that Toki Pona does not use sentence clauses. So if you would need a sentence clause in English or whatever other language, it has be multiple sentences in Toki Pona. For example, to say "you made me hungry", in Toki Pona you would have to say "sina kama e ni: mi wile moku", which translates to "you caused this: I want to eat." Crazy! So that will definitely take some getting used to. Onwards, with hopes of faster progress to come! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| matthewmartin Triglot Newbie United States suburbandestiny.com Joined 6199 days ago 22 posts - 36 votes Speaks: English*, Russian, Toki Pona | Message 5 of 14 20 December 2010 at 11:03pm | IP Logged |
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Here is the list of the toki pona minimal pairs:
http://tokipona.net/tp/MinimalPairs.aspx It's worth nothing that everything has a minimal pair and sometimes a few. Here are some memory aids for tp's minimal pairs: http://forums.tokipona.org/viewtopic.php ?f=5&t=1234&start=0 For me, for some reason only "poki come in boxes" sticks in my head. (poki =box and chocolate covered pretzel sticks) Edited by matthewmartin on 20 December 2010 at 11:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lianne Senior Member Canada thetoweringpile.blog Joined 5115 days ago 284 posts - 410 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Toki Pona, German, French | Message 6 of 14 21 December 2010 at 9:36pm | IP Logged |
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matthewmartin, thank you very much for those resources! I'm sure those will come in handy. :)
It's been a crazy couple of days. Saturday was my family's Christmas party, Sunday I had to study all day for the exam I had Monday morning. Monday evening I went to my office Christmas party, and tonight I'm going to a grad dinner. Yikes! So there hasn't been much language studying going on, but I have been reviewing my Anki decks and using my paper flashcards for Toki Pona whenever I'm on the bus. The paper flashcards have been very useful. Most of them are coming pretty easily right now. lon and tawa are my biggest issues there. For Esperanto, I started a new method for choosing vocabulary to learn, in addition to the lists of words by topic I'm still working through on lernu.net. I recently got my first Esperanto novel in the mail (yay!), 'Malamu vin, unu la alian". The title alone tells me that the poetic word ordering sometimes used in Esperanto is not something I've yet come to understand, because to me that says "Hate you, one the other". Anyway, for vocabulary, I read through the book's dedication and introductory paragraph, and wrote out all the words I didn't know (most of them), and then looked them up later. I figure I'll probably get some words that aren't very common, but as I do this more I think most of the words will be ones that are really common and therefore really useful. I also ordered the Esperanto translation of Alice in Wonderland on Amazon, and it's expected to arrive in early January. I'm really looking forward to reading it, so that gives me extra motivation to increase my vocabulary! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| LittleBoy Diglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5310 days ago 84 posts - 100 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto | Message 7 of 14 22 December 2010 at 4:21pm | IP Logged |
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I must admit, you're making me slightly nervous for starting Toki Pona, albeit eager to start at the same time! I would suggest Benny the Irish Polyglot's (and others) advice that each language has it's easy aspects, and those are what you should focus on. I'm looking forward to following this, as I prepare to follow in your footsteps!
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| Lianne Senior Member Canada thetoweringpile.blog Joined 5115 days ago 284 posts - 410 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Toki Pona, German, French | Message 8 of 14 23 December 2010 at 4:52pm | IP Logged |
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LittleBoy: I'm sorry! It's not really so bad. I am a big fan of Benny the Irish Polyglot, and his advice to look at the easy aspects of a language. I guess it's just my blogging tendencies coming through. I blog about the environment, which tends to bring out the dry humour in people.
I'm actually having a lot of fun with Toki Pona. The things that make me struggle a little bit are just the only things I think to write about here. So fear not! I look forward to learning both Toki Pona and Esperanto along with you this coming year. :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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