Ten participants enjoyed experiencing Toki Pona together for the first time, creating word combinations and sentences using cards. I wish we had had more time, but it was great sharing Toki Pona with people from all over the world!
Video and pics thanks to Myroslava Skrynyk and Team EdYouKyiv!
I will be presenting at Vocab@Maryland, June 16-18, 2025 at University of Maryland College Park. The presentation title is “Insights into a Minimalist Language:
Construction of a Toki Pona Corpus,” and gives some preliminary results from making a corpus of written Toki Pona. I will discuss whether frequencies of combined words show that they should be considered lexicalized, or if word combination is in fact fluid.
I will be presenting at the 11th Language Creation Conference, April 11-13, 2025 at University of Maryland College Park Language Science Center. The presentation title is “Toki Pona and Japanese: Similarities and Challenges,” and relates how my Japanese students’ second language, English, has been interfering with their acquisition of Toki Pona. This can be seen when they have trouble with features of the language that are closer to Japanese than to English.
The abstract, and soon schedule, can be seen at this link.
“Teaching Toki Pona in Japan” was published in the JALT Postconference Publication Growth Mindset in Language Education this month. The article is written in English. The full paper can be accessed from the pdf link below the abstract on the following page:
https://jalt-publications.org/articles/29087-teaching-toki-pona-japan
I will be giving a lecture on Toki Pona on Saturday, May 18 open to the public in Chigasaki, Kanagawa, Japan. After a short introduction of the language, I will be teaching basic grammar and vocabulary. It is two hours long, so attendees should be able to get a good grasp of the basics by the time it is over!
The lecture will be held in Japanese. You need to reserve a spot by May 6 as explained in the (Japanese) poster below. Also, see the poster for more details.
On November 27, 2023, I presented “Teaching Toki Pona in Japan: Insights and Implications” at the JALT International Conference 2023 in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan.
In the presentation, I introduced the basics of Toki Pona and then outlined the activities of the club I started at my university in 2022. From reflections and a student questionnaire, I found the following:
I concluded that because Toki Pona requires such a low investment in time and effort to learn, more formal research on these and other benefits is warranted.
This site was originally “Magda’s Student Lounge” and featured short articles and discussion in English. It will be changed to “Magda’s Toki Pona Site,” a place where I will gather information and links about Toki Pona. It will take a couple of months to make the change-over.
