null1024 null1024I really, really, really like Toki Pona. A lot. Seriously! toki pona li pona mute a tawa mi!
It's tiny. It's easy. It's so much fun. There are only 137 (or so) words. I genuinely think that everyone could learn Toki Pona with extremely little effort.
The grammar is dead simple. Sometimes a bit too simple, and I have my own set of opinions about that, but it's not usually a problem. The vocabulary list isn't literally as minimal as possible, but that's alright. It's small enough to be extremely easy while being large enough to be expressive.
You don't need to know anything about learning languages to pick up Toki Pona in a few months, and some people claim that they were able to get going with it within two days. That being said, it took me like two months to get going with it, and I've been using it for what might be approaching two years now.
It's small enough that you can maybe even convince your friends to learn it too, something that pretty much no other language can say. :P
It's also so small that even if you never speak to anyone with it, who cares? It takes very little time to learn. It's really easy to pick up. I'm not good at learning languages -- I'm lazy and I don't commit much to them. However, a bit over a year later, I am fairly confident in my ability to read Toki Pona and a little confident in my ability to listen to it -- I don't get nearly enough listening practice. It didn't take a year for me to learn everything, too.
My learning path involved buying the book and using Memrise to remember all the words, but you don't need either -- there are several free ways to learn.
I certainly have some issues with the language, to the point that I'm designing my own language based on it called Toki te Kone (also, note to self: work on Toki te Kone more), which adds grammar to make expressing and understanding things easier, adds a handful of words, adds a well defined number system, and gives every word a definition for every part of speech.
If I had to state my biggest issue with Toki Pona, it would be that prepositions are just naturally complicated and Toki Pona doesn't mark them at all. Worse, words used as prepositions (like tawa and lon) can be used as other parts of speech. If I never worked on Toki te Kone again, I would advocate for a single feature from it to end up in Toki Pona: in Toki te Kone, the particle u is used to specify that a word is a preposition.
Speaking of Toki te Kone -- why would I advocate for Toki Pona instead? It's (depressingly) simple: Toki te Kone is both unfinished and has a userbase of 1. In contrast, Toki Pona is a fairly mature language. It's like 22 years old. It has a fairly sizable userbase. There are a lot of actual learning resources, etc, etc. I have no timeframe on when I'll consider Toki te Kone ready for use. In the meantime, Toki Pona is here, ready to use, and even despite its flaws, works as a small language that's easy to pick up.
pini lipu la mi toki e ni: toki pona li pona a! o kama sona e ona. toki pona li ken pona e lawa sina. ona li musi a! -- in conclusion, I want to say that Toki Pona is great! Please, learn it. It can expand your mind and it's fun!