Toki Pona: The Language You Can Learn in a Day 

Ok, so this was an interesting video. There are some points I think would benefit from a correction, and I'll also add a note to some others: 0:00 mi sona ala e nimi sina. 0:12 120 words is one count, there are people who use more, some even use less - but of course that *is* the count in the official book 0:19 30 hours *on average*? No, on average it'll take longer, from the learners I've seen. Plus, 30 hours wouldn't exclude pauses, so subtract sleeping, eating and any other activity that isn't learning the language 0:30 "toki" is derived from Tok Pisin. Ultimately, it does come from English due to Tok Pisin being a pidgin, but I don't know why you would skip over that 0:53 English consonants? Spanish vowels? Oversimplification. "j" doesn't get pronounced like in English, and many languages have the same sounds for the vowels, Spanish is only one of them and they don't derive from Spanish directly. Weird choice. 1:07 "regardless of vowel placement" - Uh... I mean, that's true, but I don't see what vowel placement would have to do with it in the first place??? 1:19 no, "ala" negates any content word, not just subjects, plus it can work as the head of its own phrase 1:21 toki pona does have those thing, just not as a part of the grammar 1:30 nothing ever gets capitalised in toki pona except for names 1:47 lists "o" as a possble interjection - ths might be up for debate, but currently is a bit unusual, I don't know why it would be listed here 1:48 typo: "pakola" should be "pakala" 1:57 ignoring the capitalisation, "sini" is a typo of "sina" 2:03 not quite - seme here is a modifier to "pilin", so instead of asking "you feel what", it's more "you what-feel" or "you feel in what way" 2:12 while it limits communication (intentionally of course), you can build from the basics to talk about anything 2:15 typicall, there's no polite speech, and there's nothing that would indicate formal speech, but politeness can be included - it's a cultural distinction that doesn't feature in toki pona as a fixed part, but certainly you can act out a set of expected things or phrases if you need to be polite in the context of who you're talking to 2:18 ok, yes, that can work - "start with pona" - that's good - expressing gratitude is a whole topic on itself, so having this in the video should be ok, even if it's not the whole story 2:25 yeah, similarly, this can work - there is an expansion that includes more words that can work for very exact numbers - although "ala" and "ale" would also work for non-exact numbers 2:31 ok, so I didn't mishear the beginning of the video - there were some syllables swallowed - the "e" in "mute" does get pronounced 2:46 noun phrases? nope - full sentences, context, not long noun phrases, in fact long noun phrases make it hard to understand 2:47 noun phrases come after the word they describe? That's... modifiers. Ok, so we have different terminology, but that still isn't right 2:53 oh, "j" doesn't get pronounced like that typically 2:56 uh, no, that's not the translation. More like "is a moving box". You might have been missing a couple of things 3:13 "suwi" coming first means you're talking about a more sugary substance rather than a liquid, so you'd usually have "telo" first. Then there's the issue of "kepeken" not meaning "with" in the same exact way as in English, and "en" being in an untypical place as far as modern courses are teaching (although it was used that way in earlier versions of toki pona, so you might still come across it, and people do use it, so it's not totally wrong, just one thing among many that are weird to be included there) - oh, and it'd probably "kule pi ijo kasi" if I follow the thought of what is said here 3:36 arabic is alphabetical (well, usually an abjad), and pretty phonetical What's missing from my-this comment is that there are points about the philosophy that are slightly off. Discussing this would take the same amount of text twice over, and I'd have to disentangle/put into appropriate context the more quippy parts of the video that aren't meant to be fact giving as much as the rest

Sam is so good at being bad he made a ton of orthography and pronunciation mistakes in a language with one of the easiest orthographies and phonologies

Learning a language to talk to robots is literally what computer programming is

In case anyone's wondering, someone who learned toki pona in only one day would sound like Sam does in this video.

guys i think he tried to learn the language within a day

For having so few sounds and words to learn, Sam completely butchered the pronunciation lmao.

As a toki pona speaker, I am so glad this guy makes a "mistakes" video every year.

Hi! There appear to be a few errors here, here's a few clarifications from a self-proclaimed advanced toki pona speaker: 30 hours is a reasonable time frame to get speaking the language, but mastery takes a long time, like any language. The first letters of toki pona words are never capitalized, that's reserved for loan words, so 'mi moku' instead. 'pakola' is a mispelling of pakala, 'sini' for sina. Yes it is true that having so few words makes it difficult to specify exact things, but toki pona relies more heavily on context than large noun phrases. For bricks, 'kiwen' (rock) by itself may work well. 'poki loje lon sinpin li poki tawa' means more like, 'the red boxes on the wall are moving boxes'. I believe Arabic's script is in fact phonetically based, but I am not very familiar. Thanks for shedding some light on our language!

Can we appreciate how the woman who made up this language is actually named Lang

Judging by the comments, this episode is gonna be quite prominent in the next "Every mistake" video XD Still, tanks for bringing more attention to this interesting language!

Arabic is 100% a phonetically written language. Sure, sometimes the vowels are not explicitly written, but they can be made explicit and the consonants are always written.

There are actually some Toki Pona natives, although not entirely successfully so. (Aronora made an interview) And at 1:56 you said "sini" instead of "sina" Oh and just a side note: The goal of Toki Pona is to be simplistic, so using large noun chains isn't encouraged

As a linguist, any time Sam puts out a video on language, I notice so many errors, though most of them aren’t *too* bad. I wonder if it’s the same in his other videos and I just don’t notice because I know next to nothing about logistics, geography or engineering…

One thing that wasn't mentioned is that toki pona is a contextual language. telo could mean water, but it can also just mean liquid. Once you use some of the few words in the language to try to describe a drink like coffee, you can just call it "telo ni" (this liquid) after that. Also, if the person is there with you and they can clearly see that it's coffee, you can just say "telo ni" since the context is already clear.

toki a! I've been a speaker of toki pona for the past 2-3 years now. I don't comment much, but this video makes a LOT of mistakes that I'd like to correct. My earlier comment got deleted because the amount of corrections I had was so long that RU-vid thought it was spam so I'll make this JUST the really bad corrections. Even with all of these mistakes corrected, this video remains a terrible jumping off point for learning Toki Pona and will affect the community. People will come to Toki Pona with the assumption that they can learn it in a day and that it's great for speaking to computers, neither of which are true (I'm the developer of one of the best toki pona machine translators, I would know.) In its current state, new learners of Toki Pona coming from this video creates a problem of requiring new learners to first unlearn what they learned here, before learning the language. That being said... 0:00 - The thumbnail of the video says "kipisi sama kama e wile sona", which translates back to "to slice your want for knowledge similarly to becoming". I get that it's going for "half as interesting", but this thumbnail is a sentence fragment that is nearly meaningless. 0:53 - The consonents are based off of Latin letters, not English letters. And things are pronounced nearly identically to each letters sound in the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). 1:19 - Toki Pona does have gender and tenses, these things are just not intrinsic to sentence and you can specify them if you deem them relevant. For example, the words "mije", "meli", and "tonsi" mean "man", "woman", and "non-binary" respectively. 1:29 - Sentences in toki pona are NEVER capitalized. Capitalizing a sentence in toki pona is gramatically incorrect. A Capitalized word signifies that the word is a name that describes a noun and is not used when starting a sentence. 1:46 - "pakola" is not a word in toki pona. This is a mispelling of "pakala". 1:55 - "Sini" is also not a word in toki pona. This is a mispelling of "sina". Also this should be uncapitalized. 2:12 - More than the basics can be communicated. Please see this video explaining non-euclidean geometry in Toki Pona. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-tL1WBUOqE48.html (English subtitles are available) 2:30 - "mute" is pronounced with two syllables, "mu" and "te". It should be pronounced "mu-te", and not "moot". 2:39 - Describing something in Toki Pona WITHOUT CONTEXT can take more words. Many things that I say in toki pona would require more words in English to say the same. Toki Pona is more broad than English, but you don't need to make up for that broadness to be understood. In context, just "telo" by itself could mean "coffee", rather than what's shown in a later example. 2:49 - The translation for "I love bricks", "poki loje lon sinpin li poki tawa.", is just... not even the same sentence as "I love bricks."... or even close... This translates back to (being generous with the translation, because I would read "lon sinpin" as "at the front" instead) "The red container at the wall is a moving container." I think what he WANTED to say was "poki loje lon sinpin li pona tawa mi.", which is better, translating to "The red container at the wall is good to me." But... this sentence should be something like "kiwen leko loje li pona tawa mi.", which translates to "The red block-like rock is good to me." 2:52 - The letter "j" is pronounced like the English letter "y", not like the English letter "h". It's similar to how it's pronounced in German or Swedish. 3:13 - The pronunciation for "suwi telo wawa kepeken namako en kule ijo kasi." is just... completely butchered. The first syllable of a word in toki pona is always the one to be stressed. It is not "kePEken", it is "KEpeken". This is true for every word. "ijo" is pronounced wrong. Vowels in toki pona are pronounces similar to Spanish or Esperanto, where the vowel "i" should be pronounced like the english letter "e". 3:13 - "suwi telo wawa kepeken namako en kule ijo kasi" translates back to "Energetic watery sweets with spice and plant-like thing-like colors." The usage of "en" here means that this statement would only work as the subject of a sentence, and is two seperate subjects, the color and the wood and the sweets. "en" does NOT act like "and". Since we're describing a liquid, "telo" should come first. "telo suwi wawa namako pi kule kasi" would be a good way to describe coffee, meaning "plant colored spicy energetic sweet drink." But this is overly specific and just "telo wawa namako" would get across "coffee" to a toki pona speaker. 3:30 - As mentioned before, "siTElen pona" should be "SItelen pona" 3:36 - Arabic is absolutely phonetic. There is a lot more that it gets wrong, and I've posted the rest of the list in the replies.

As someone who has been learning this language on and off for about a year: no, you can not learn it in a day.

While I'm glad to see toki pona being featured and getting more recognition, there's so much wrong with this video that it kinda hurts to watch. Everyone, please look into this language beyond this video because this does not do it justice.

I’m amazed that Sam managed to butcher the pronunciation of a language that has 14 simple sounds in total

As an Arab, I have to correct you on one thing: Arabic is totally a phonetic language. Sometimes the 3 basic vowels are not written (أ-و-ي) but these instead are replaced with signs that correlate to each noun. Heck, 90% of Arabic grammar is about knowing when each sign should be used and what not, and I guarantee Arabic wouldn't be hard if those signs didn't even exist. So no, Arabic is phonetic.

jan Misali has a great video series teaching Toki Pona, and he's also one of the best RU-vidrs out there in general.

The last time Sam did conlang video,it got everything absolutely wrong. Glad to see traditions are still alive lmao

even though you can learn the language in a day, it doesnt seem like the hai writers bothered to learn anything about it

*sees title* "You overestimate my ability to learn things"

I think at this point he's morally obligated to mess up the pronunciation of any language he covers on HAI

I have a few corrections. I'm a fluent toki pona speaker who's been learning since 2019, and this video gets quite a bit wrong. 0:33 toki is derived from Tok Pisin, not English. 0:48 The English alphabet has 26 letters. Both English and toki pona use the Latin alphabet. 0:56 They're not "based off" the English letters. They're common sounds cross-linguistically, and they use the same glyphs that the IPA uses to represent them. 1:00 They're not Spanish. They just have a similar pronunciation. 1:19 None of these are articles. 1:48 pakala, not pakola. 1:57 sina, not sini. 2:30 You pronounce the e in mute. It's, vaguely, "moo-tay" (or /mute/ in the IPA) 2:53 j is not pronounced like h. It's pronounced like y. 2:58 This sentence doesn't mean that. It actually means "red container on wall is moving container". I think you wanted to say "leko loje sinpin li pona tawa mi", or "red wall box is good to me". 3:14 Stress each word on the first syllable. ijo sounds like ee-yo. Adjectives come after nouns, so telo wawa suwi. You don't need ijo here. You don't have to say all that to describe a coffee - I would settle for telo kapesi (brown liquid) or telo wawa (strong liquid). 3:31 Stress sitelen on the first syllable. 4:00 Sam breaks toki pona's phonotactics - you can't have m at the end of a syllable. You'd have to go for San instead. HAI is also against the phonotactics, not just because there's an h but also because you can't have two vowels next to each other This isn't everything, but it's most of what I picked up on. I don't really like how this video portrays toki pona as difficult or unwieldy to use - the purpose of toki pona is simplicity, and if you try to stuff an entire English sentence into toki pona, you're doing it wrong. It's about reduction of a concept to its most basic form, not describing every single aspect of something. Context amd relevance are key. Either way, if this video serves as an entry point of more people into the community, I'm happy. It would just be nicer if this video got more things right.

Correction about Arabic: It is in fact a phonetic writing system, it's just unless you're writing something for learners or the exact pronunciation, you don't use the little vowel markers. Only consonants and long vowels Examples; (note: I'm using this symbol [:] for long vowels, which are always written in Arabic.) Also Arabic is written from right to left and tends to be formatted small so the formatting might be a little weird here (RU-vid is really wonky with Arabic and Hebrew writing because of that), feel free to plug this in a document and crank up the font size if you have trouble seeing stuff. { انا مارك }[a:na: m:ark] (I am Mark) is an entirely phonetic sentence, one-for-one, in part because of the long vowels. Technically you can add indications that the raa and kaa do not have any vowel to make it less ambiguous, but for the most part it is phonetic. Notice both a:na: and ma:rk take on the alif for the long "a" sound. { انا طليبة }[a:na: Tali:b(t)a] (I am a [female] student) the word "Tali:ba" is written with a taa marbuta (ة), which indicates femininity and changes to a regular taa (ت) when suffixes are added or plurality are indicated. While the consonants are indicated, the short vowels are not. (the capital T is a retroflex consonant, different from taa). The above sentence with vowel markers would be انا طَليبَة. Taa marbuta takes on the "a" sound automatically until it changes to normal taa in changes such as طليبتي [Tali:bati:] (my [female] students) Also yes, in the present tense Arabic drops "to be". To say "I was a (female) student", you would say كُنتُ طليبة [kuntu Tali:b(t)a]. But if you don't say the short "u", it becomes "she was a student" (كانتْ طليبة) [ka:nat Tali:b(t)a]. The grammar is way more complex than the writing system, and that's the hardest part about Arabic, not the writing. It's kind of like Spanish but much harder because of other verb aspects. That's just the tip of the iceberg, but otherwise I'm glad to see more people interested in topics like languages.

The next HAI mistakes video is going to have a 10 minute section just on this episode

I no longer trust this channel to give accurate information

the entire kulupu showed up to dunk on this video, just incredible

Arabic is phonetic😐 It just has an abjad instead of an alphabet

"so you can take a break from learning with a little bit of learning" lol most accurate statement about MIT

this video really needs to be redone omg. it's so simple and there are so many errors :(

It's unsettling to me how someone so knowledgeable just...cannot produce basic sounds without them being overtly "American" 💀 having flashbacks to his China videos

It isn’t too hard to talk about coffee in toki pona if the sentence and concepts are simplified. Part of the design of the language is using simple sentences and compound words that only contain the amount of information you need to communicate your desired message.

as a toki pona speaker, i’m very glad what appears to be every toki pona speaker on the internet has arrived before i did to correct sam on his pronunciation c:

Even though I speak Toki Pona, his butchered pronunciation made me feel I was having a stroke.

His next mistakes video is basically just gonna be about this.

I watched this video soon after it came out, and it was the first time I ever heard of toki pona. I shoved it into my memory as just another one of the interesting things Sam talks about. Around a month or two later (although before looking at the upload date I probably would have said I watched this video in 2021 and it was over a year later), I saw it somewhere else. I had recently decided I wanted to be a linguist, so I figured I'd learn toki pona. It took me a while, and I rarely tried to learn anything until this summer, but in recent weeks I've started getting very close to fluency. This is the first time since December that I've watched this video, and it's really sad to see how inaccurate it is. Still, thank you for introducing me to this amazing language and this amazing community. - jan Osuka

Gotta love how he explains the basic pronunciation rules and then screws up right after that, I don't even speak the language and noticed a lot of mistakes, that's just impressively little care. It's really funny tho, to the point that I find it a bit charming. I might just go ahead and learn this language out of curiosity.

1:07 "each word's first syllable is emphasized" 3:31 "si-TE-len po-na"

"kipisi sama kama e wile sona" so true bestie

this has more errors than correct translations lmao

guys, we found him... b gilson

*Welcome to HAI, the show that gets facts wrong about **_your_** favourite conlang*

90% of this year's mistakes video will be just this video.

to all of you not familiar with toki pona i beg you please go watch literally anyone else's video on it. jan Misali's are good but anything is better. i really don't like being mean online but this is a popular channel with presumably enough resources to at least, spend a bit more time reviewing stuff before putting it out. like maybe run the video through a couple people who speak the language and could point some of these things out; as other people have said, it is an actual language that is spoken by people, and it doesn't seem like a lot of those people's input went into this. i really hope the people for whom this is the first exposure to toki pona actually go look at other sources it really wouldn't be as bad if the video didn't present itself as somehow being an authoritative source on the language while not even being close to an accurate surface reading of it

Bro being fluent in toki pona while watching this video makes me feel like I'm "having a stroke"

Hello! It’s nice to see you take interest in Toki Pona! I would like to point out that there are some fundamental misconceptions being presented however. After the 1:00 mark, the video begins a narrative that is misrepresentative of the language. Others have already pointed out the grammatical and factual errors. But even with those changed, the video narrative still will not capture the fundamental cultural or philosophical mindset that makes this language work. I think to fix this video, the narrative will need to be redone from scrach. For example, the way coffee is described is not how toki pona speakers speak. I would simply personally say telo wawa or telo pimeja. Long noun phrases aren't a big part of the language in practice. Toki Pona is a language where you build a shared vision with the person you're speaking to, and establish a shared context. This makes the language generally short and concise, contrary to what it might look like if you haven't studied it. I feel like promoting this misconception among others might make this video turn people away from Toki Pona rather than find interest in it. I've been speaking Toki Pona for a year and I run an international Toki Pona language exchange community in VR, where plenty of fluent speakers attend. I would love to invite you to chat sometime if you are interested in fixing the video.

who told you 'poki loje lon sinpin li poki tawa' meant bricks are lovely to me? this means 'face existing red containers are moving containers' why not just 'kiwen li pona'?

while laso can mean blue it can also mean green or any colours in between. Cool to see a video on a language I love but god some of the errors hurt.

The Arabic writing system is phonetic. It has phonograms that represent individual sounds, not logograms that represent morphemes or words like Chinese

900 I can't wait to see what Half as Intelligent gets wrong this time 0:32 Massive pona-fication but yeah 0:43 "Let's start with letters, which are like words but small" (Punches the wall) Dry Humour 1:21 Wait, did he just say "ala" negates the subject. Most of the time when you're using ala, you are negating the verb 1:30 I'll allow the capitalization, since this is someone who has never heard of this lang before 1:48 Pretty sure this is because there wasn't enough enough room up there, but there's also "toki", which means "Hello". There's also "kin" which means "yes" and is functionally the same as "a", and "lon" which also means "yes" but not "kin" or "a" 1:56 Sina, nor sini. This is Oksurn Mk II. 2:30 Changed my mind. This is Oksurn Mk II. 2:32 "To Three and beyond" (Punches the wall). Although, I (personally) would translate "infinity" as "Ale" 2:52 Oh boy I sure hope he doesn't pronounce j as /dʒ/ (English J sound). "poki lohe" WTF?! 2:57 Also, you forgot "mi". And it's "pona tawa" not "poki tawa". "poki tawa [mi]" means "a box to me" 3:13 Okay, I give up. There's so many things to unpack here. I'm 90% sure you, like many beginners of many languages, just looked through a dictionary and tried to find the words you need 3:36 Arabic uses an abjad. It's an alphabet without vowel letters. It's still phonetic, idiot 4:00 This may seem like HAI standing for Half as Intelligent, but h not being in the TP alphabet is actually a pretty good point. The thing is, say you want to transliterate the name "Masahiro", or "Hawaii" or "Haiyi", You'd have to do it like "Masailo" or "Awai" or "Aji". But two vowels next to each other is not allowed in Toki Pona, and the syllable "ji" isn't allowed either". 4:29 "In case you were interested in making Minecraft Borderline Unplayable" (Punches the wall, the ceiling, the floor, a brick, a potato, a Lamborghini and HAI) 4:55 (Punches the aforementioned objects again)

1:48 nimi sin li lon: pakola! pakola (interjection): to make a mistake in the same way that Half as Interesting did at 1:48 on their video on toki pona.

jan Sam: these sounds can be pronounced by almost anyone! Also Sam at 2:30: _moot_

if you dont listen to the entire toki pona community dunking on you for this video idk what to tell you. i dont even really speak it myself but there are too many mistakes to count and most of them are blatantly obvious to anyone with even a small amount of exposure to actual speakers. it seems more like you made this entire video in a day, without bothering to contact anyone who actually knew anything about toki pona in the process lol

if this is how accurate your other videos are i cant watch your channel anymore

the man somehow got everything he said wrong in some way

This is simultaneously one of your most error-wridden videos and one of the things I am most excited for you to talk about. I kind of hope you take this down and upload a fixed version...

every single jan pi toki pona found this video and went "bombastic side eye." "CRIMINAL OFFENSIVE SIDE EYE." also kepeken namako keeps me up at night

It has never been more clear that the person writing and the person reading the scripts are not the same lol

there is soooooo much wrong with this, coming from someone actually learning the language

toki pona speaker here, you absolutely can't learn to use the language in a day. You might memorize the vocab but you won't be conversational without at least a few weeks of effort. Less than any other language but it's still literally a langauge

0:33 You joke, but that actually was the point. The zen practice or happiness through simplicity.

I know about 30 words so far. I really enjoy toki pona. My favorite sentence so far is "soweli meli li lili"

There are quite a few mistranslations here, I'm going to point a few out: technically, toki comes from Tok Pisin "tok", though that word is derived from English talk, so... good enough I suppose. 1:29, 1:55, 2:16, words aren't capitalized in toki pona, unless they are loan words. 1:55 "Sini" should be "sina," also pilin should probably be pronounced more like "pee-leen" (or just /pilin/ in IPA), though its technically not wrong to say it that way, just very English-y. 2:28 mute is pronounced "mu-tey," no silent e's in toki pona. Also, there are kinda more numbers (ala can mean zero, luka can mean both hand and five, mute can mean specifically 20, and ale/ali can mean 100), but they are still pretty frustrating to use and its often just better to avoid them if you can. 2:52 "j" in toki pona is pronounced like English y. Also, this sentence doesn't really make sense. "poki loje lon sinpin li poki tawa" would mean something like "the red box in the wall is a moving-box." What you probably want is either "mi olin e poki loje lon sinpin" (I love red boxes in the wall) or "poki loje lon sinpin li pona tawa mi" (red boxes in the wall are good to me/in my opinion) 3:13 your pronunciation is still pretty off, especially with ijo (should be pronounced more like ee-yo), and the word order is a bit confusing again. "suwi telo wawa kepeken namako en kule ijo kasi" means "strong/energetic wet sugar using spice and natural thing-color." For the intended phrase, you'd probably want "telo suwi wawa kepeken namako kepeken kule pi kasi kiwen" which would roughly be "sweet energetic drink using spice and using the color of a hard plant (a.k.a. wood)" 3:30 sitelen should emphasize the first syllable. "SEE-te-len," not "see-TE-len." also, sitelen pona also could just mean "good writing," since pona means both. 3:35 Arabic does have a phonetic system of writing. It uses an abjad, which is basically just an alphabet without letters for vowels. for another logography, you'd probably want to look at Egyptian heiroglyphs. 3:57 While yes, you can spell out "s-a-m", proper names have to be changed to fit toki pona's syllable structure, which can be tricky. Also, proper nouns are always adjectives that you have to put onto another word, like "jan" for people. Instead of "jan Sam", it'd have to be "jan San" or "jan Samu" or something like that. For HAI, you could possibly do something like "kulupu Eseja" to approximate the sound, or "kulupu pi musi lili" (group "a little interesting", or something like that) 4:05 I'm pretty sure toki pona has a few native speakers, or at least attempts, since people have spoken it around children as they've grown up! Sure, those children also know another language usually, but it is a bit more complicated. While there are quite a few mistakes here, it's still really nice making a video about the language! Hopefully it'll get people interested in learning the language, which is always great! If anyone wants to come try learning the language, I'd definitely recommend it! It is honestly fairly simple to get started, the community is really nice and friendly, and its pretty fun trying to use the limited vocabulary to translate things. Well anyways, mi tawa! o pali e tenpo pona!

😭 as a waso pi toki pona, this video pains me immensely. videos like these, which clearly have no research done beyond the bare minimum, doom new learners by giving them expectations and heaps of incorrect information. toki pona can't be learned efficiently in a day; some learners are still making discoveries about it years into their learning process. it's not that hard to consult with community members about these things; as many other fellow toki pona speakers have already pointed out everything wrong with this video in particular, you can see that, as a community, we're very enthusiastic and more than willing to aid in the process of making things like this :'( the community deserves better than this 😭

Can’t wait to see this video featured multiple times when he does his next recap of mistakes

3:40 I will now be using "Pictionary" for a dictionary with logographic/ideographic scripts

If you are seriously interested in toki pona, I would recommend jan Misali’s videos about the language. Tbh this video seems under-researched and rushed

This entire video’s script will be on the errors. I appreciate trying to include us, but please check one of the many dictionaries, discords, websites, forums, etc on information about the language and to learn that Arabic is definitely a phonetic script

2:30 "Mute" is pronounced as "moo-tay" not "moot". Every letter is pronounced in Toki Pona

This guy should collab with Sam from Jet Lag: The Game

As someone who subscribes to quite a few TP RU-vid channels, I had to do a double take when I realised this was uploaded by HAI and not one of them. Overall, a good overview, but there are some small errors, as some others have pointed out: 1:29 All words should be lowercase, except proper nouns (names). 1:48 'pakola' should be 'pakala'. 1:54 'sini' should be 'sina'. 2:14 While not entirely wrong, it's a little more complicated. Politeness is assumed to be the default; impoliteness can just be expressed through words. It's of course not as complicated as something like English, but that's true with basically everything. 2:24 'While these are the only words that can *only* refer to numbers or amounts, there are other words that people use to refer to numbers (ala = 0, luka = 5, ale/ali = 100). 2:30 'mute' is pronounced 'moo-tay'. Every vowel in TP is pronounced, unlike English. 2:55 I'm going to be honest, I have no idea what you've written here. 'poki' refers to a container, not just something box-shaped. Leko would be more accurate. I also assume the second 'poki' was supposed to be 'pona'. However, I would rephrase this completely as just 'mi olin e leko loje' - 'I love red blocks'. The word olin literally just means 'love'. 3:16 Pretty good, but 'suwi' should come after the word 'telo', as adjectives come after nouns, and 'kule ijo kasi' should be 'kule pi ijo kasi' because of confusing grammar regarding adjectives and adverbs that nobody really understands. Also, 'en' refers to subjects. 'kule' is not a subject, but an adjective, so it should be more like 'telo suwi wawa pi kule pi ijo kasi (kepeken) namako', but even here, 'kepeken' is unnecessary, though not technically incorrect - 'sweet powerful liquid with caffeine' is valid, but it's easier to just say 'sweet powerful caffeinated liquid', especially in TP where it just required the removal of the word 'kepeken instead of completely changing the word order. Other than that, I'd probably describe it in a bit less detail, such as 'telo wawa pimeja' (black, strong liquid) is probably good enough. Despite my paragraph-long rambling, though, it was still understandable. 3:30 'sitelen' should be pronounced as 'SI-te-len', not 'si-TE-len'. Stress always falls on the first syllable. Still really appreciate people talking about this language though. It's great, and the community is one of my favourites online.

Simplicity is pretty much the whole point of Toki Pona. You aren't supposed to worry about the specifics. Part of what makes the language so attractive for many is that it is this simplicity that lets users of the language not concern themselves with needing to hyper-specify every little thing. Going to the coffee shop and ordering a caramel macchiato could be as easy as saying "sina o pali e telo pimeja tawa mi. mi wile telo pimeja lon sewi li telo walo. kepeken o telo ko suwi" Or "You, make dark/brown liquid (coffee) for me. I want dark liquid (espresso) on top of white liquid (milk). Use sticky sweet liquid (caramel)! Apologies to any tokiponists who actually know the language in a usable fashion, but I just wanted to demonstrate that communicating ideas in toki pona isn't difficult, it just takes context and a different way of thinking about the world.

Today must be jan Misali's favourite day

The fact that Half as Interesting could have contacted any one of the many commenters here that are prolific members of the online Toki Pona community (and thus easy to find via the ma pona discord or the official subreddit) and fixed 90% of the errors in a single script run-through-cmon man.

they beating your monsi in the comments rn

2:54 "At walls, red containers are moving containers." 3:19 "Energetic liquid sweetness with embellishment, and plant object color."

For people who can speak toki pona, this video is hilarious but not in the way Sam intended lol. (jan pi toki pona la, sitelen tawa ni li musi mute a! taso, jan San li wile ala e musi ni a!)

As a tokiponist his pronunciations HURT dkdndjddn Just a few important ones - 'mute' is pronounced more like 'moot-ayy' (no silent letters) and the letter J in TP is pronounced like the english letter Y - 'loje' is 'low-yay' Also by the way toki pona isn't ambiguous, it's VAGUE. Ambiguity is when you can't tell the difference between two possible meanings 9f a sentence. Toki pona's words all have specific definitions, but those definitions are broader than any natural language.

Using overly lengthy noun phrases goes against the philosophy of Toki Pona. It's a language meant to keep things simple and minimalist, so it's perfectly fitting that describing things in detail is difficult and clunky.

My fellow tokiponists... I would rather have a popular channel like this create a video with a positive attitude about the language and community we love than ignore us. If we criticize creators when they make mistakes but work in good faith it reflects badly on us. Be pona.

I guess he needs to fuel the runtime on the next mistakes video somehow

lichens also has Toki Pona support, hopefully much more things will too bc Toki Pona has an ISO code, "tok"

Jan Misali would tear this video apart lmao

yeah we can definitely tell you learned it in a day

hello fluent speaker of toki pona here, there is a lot of misinformation in this video please do your own research and ask speakers, half as interesting says a lot of things that aren’t true

I’ve tried playing Minecraft in Toki Pona & it’s actually pretty great, except that they haven’t translated a lot of their unique words (like Redstone, Creeper, End, or Piglin).

I think your next mistakes video should be entirely dedicated to this video, maybe get jan Misali in there

This is proof you shouldn't make a video after scanning a wikipedia page real quick.

I feel this would be a great thing to learn before learning another language, it starts by getting people used to the concept of leaning/remembering different terms

I can't wait for the HAI corrections video lol (kulupu HAI li pali e sitelen tawa. sitelen tawa wan li toki e ni: kulupu HAI li pakala mute. mi wile lukin e ona a!)

hey sam! im not sure where you got your information for this video, but most of it is very flawed, misleading, or just dead wrong, from the facts to the translations to the pronunciations. i know you mean well, and as much as i appreciate you putting a spotlight onto the language, i'm concerned about the effects your incorrect information may have on people seeking to learn the language. some of my fellow tokiponists have left comments explaining the errors in detail, and I sincerely hope you take a look at those. i am awaiting the corrections video :)

new radio shows?

Glad that you made this video! I always wanted toki pona to get some more attention

another mistake i'm not seeing pointed out: "luka" means five, (or hand, think five fingers), but is not listed at 2:24. any number can be expressed by breaking said number down into these parts, thirteen becomes luka luka tu wan. notably, "ale" is also a common stand-in for 100, but there's less of a consensus there (some people understand it to mean 1000, and i mean like, come on.) nevertheless, toki pona isn't meant for dealing with large numbers, just as arithmetic isn't meant for poetry.

0:45 actually that's where things are starting to get difficult --- it heavily relies on grammar, phrases etc. --- the same way brainfuck isn't actually a simple computer language just because it has 8 instructions

my favorite toki pona number: "mut". i appreciate the effort, but wow....

toki! I am a speaker of toki pona and I would like to point out a few inconsistencies about your video. Just out of the gate, I would like to say that the "120 words" metric isn't that accurate. As of jan Sonja's "The Toki Pona Dictionary," there is now more like 137 words, including the ku suli. It is not wrong to say it has 120 words, but it is not complete. Secondly, the 30 hours, while not a terrible metric, has questionable sources at best, and was written by people not very ingrained in the community. This is kind of nitpicky but it needs to be said. Also, you passively said that the consonants were based on English but there are some issues with this. First, consonants like p, t, and k are often aspirated in English, but this is canonically incorrect pronunciation. Also, j, is pronounced as English "y," and so this isn't very accurate. A better way to say is to be "The consonants and vowels are pronounced approximately like those in Indonesian." When you are discussing how you say "how are you doing," you use the word "sini" instead of "sina." Also, it is customary to not capitalize the first letter of the sentence, which you do throughout the entire video. Also, when you said "there is no way to specify politeness," this really isn't that accurate. toki pona is assumed to be polite unless specifically specifying otherwise. While there may not be direct ways to translate phatic expressions, you can construct these in context. For example, if you helped me understand a concept in my math class, I could say "sina pona tawa mi tan pana sona" which literally translates to "you are good in the perspective of me because the giving of knowlege," or "You are good to me because you taught me." Basically, I am saying that phatic expressions are highly context dependent, and thus to say there isn't really a way to express them is kind of ignorant. Your segment on numbers described numbers without mentioning the various nasin nanpa-s that exist. For example, using wan (1), tu (2), luka (5), mute (20), and ale (100), you can make numbers like 34 (mute luka luka tu tu), or 65 (mute mute mute luka), or a bunch of other numbers. Also, you said "moot" for mute instead of "moo-tay" Also, your segment on "coffee" wasn't very accurate. While to completely remove ambiguity you have to make long phrases, context removes a lot of this. If it is the morning and you say you are at starbucks, saying something like "I am drinking a black coffee with foam," you could say "mi moku e telo pimeja e ko suwi," or "I consume the black liquid and sweet semisolid" which should get the point across. About your short mention of names, you forgot to mention a common practice dubbed tokiponization, which is when you edit your name to fit toki pona phonetics. My name, for example, Wyatt, could be approximated using "Waja." another example is Sebastian, which could be "Sapasan" or "Sapasin." This is often left to the person you are talking to, so theoretically you could use a completely unrelated name to be referred to. You also should have mentioned the cartouches and headnouns used for names. When talking about AI, you suggest that AI are good at recognizing speech patterns in toki pona. However, this does not mean they are good at recognizing it. Artificial Intelligence is notoriously bad at context. And, since toki pona is highly context dependent, this makes it very hard to get an AI to understand the full depth of meaning that toki pona has. Also, lastly, you forgot to mention that the discord communities existed. Communities like ma pona pi toki pona or kama sona are not only important to the community, but popular places to come to learn toki pona. If you're going to mention the reddit and facebook communities, the discord communities should not be left out. You should also look into the telegram groups that house the non-english-speaking population of toki pona. And with that, I bid farewell. mi tawa!

"Sweet energetic water with embellishment and color of wood" is actually a pretty spot-on description of a Starbucks drink.