 Hey guys, so I've been learning Tokipon now for roughly three weeks, which has consisted of three to four hours a week, primarily of absorbing the language via videos. I've been watching the video series by Jan Telekomman and just allowing the videos to do their job, which is to teach via the comprehensible input methodology. I am a massive fan of that method. It's only something that I've really started applying to the languages that I'm learning in the last year or so, and I really wish that I started it much for further back in my language learning journey. For example, when I was learning Esperanto, or even when I started learning Chinese because it would have sped things up so much more. But I guess the problem with the comprehensible input methodology is that you don't really know that you're actually making progress until you just kind of understand everything in context. But this video isn't about that. I'm kind of getting sidetracked. This video is about books. See, about a week ago, I was watching his series and I was thinking, you know what? It'd be really awesome if I just had like some Tokipon of books. There's something to be said about having like physical books in your hand. Like, it makes the thing so much more real. It's probably why I've got such an insanely large Esperanto book collection, because then I can just point at it and go, look, I am not crazy. This is a real language I speak. And having books just makes things more real. Plus, they're kind of handy. You can just sit anywhere and just like pop them open and start reading. And they're a great conversation starter if you're reading them on a train, because someone might be like, what is that? So anyway, a week ago, I was thinking about this and I was thinking about going to Amazon and picking up some books, but they were quite costly and I was like, I guess I'll wait a little bit until I'm a bit further along in my journey and I'll pick some up. But it was as if Jan Sonja was sitting there in the shadows listening to my inner thoughts because they reached out to me and said, hey, do you want some Tokipon of books? And I was like, would I? Yes, I would love some Tokipon of books. And they said, I will help you purchase some books. So I went on a book buying spree, some Tokipon of book buying spree, which is not that big of a spree, because there's not many books in Tokipon of yet published ones. But I did pick up a few and today I want to show them to you, I want to present them to you, tell you what I think about each one, give you my thoughts, the good points, the bad points and also make some comparisons with Esperano, I guess. So the first book in the series is Tokipon of the Language of Good, followed by Tokipon of Dictionary. And lastly, learning language Tokipon of. Now, I'm going to start with the smallest and most plain of them all. This is Tokipon of the Language of Good. This book does not look like much. It's thin, it really doesn't look that important. But don't be tricked. This book is basically the Tokipon of equivalent to the Esperanto, La Fundamento de Esperanto. For those who don't know what I just said, that's the foundational document for Esperano. So constructed languages go best when they have like a base for the language that is published in the community agrees on and decides to follow that as the language because otherwise they all splinter off and then you basically the language falls apart. Now, Tokipon has gone through the same kind of evolutionary path that Esperanto went through in its early days. You had the first book, the first followers, adherence of the language they learned, they found the problems, they ironed out the problems and then they published their foundational document. This is basically that. And therefore, just like La Fundamento de Esperanto, it primarily consists of learning materials. So here's a extract from the book. As you can see, it just says language preverbs and it just covers the language. There's nothing too fancy here. Now, last night when I was reading this, I went through the entire course section pretty much in an hour or it might have been a little bit more. And I realized that I actually have pretty much learned the entire grammar of Tokipona. There was a few words that I didn't know about because I just never encountered them in that video series by Jan Telokoman, but I have learned the language because I was able to read everything in there. So that made me really excited to know that. But it also meant that half of this book was pretty much irrelevant to me. But the second half of this book is where the cool stuff is. So we're going to start with the first part of the second part. First part of the second part. So we have Tokipona proverbs. So you've got some proverbs here, their English, their Tokipona. And then you've got these beautiful diagrams, which aren't diagrams. They're actually a written form of Tokipona. So those diagrams, as I said, are a written form. There's actually multiple ways to write Tokipona. The most common, obviously, being the Latin script, but people actually write using this glyph-like system, which I think is amazing and I plan to learn eventually. But now I want to talk about proverbs in Tokipona because it's kind of counterintuitive. See, a proverb generally is like a play on words that has a specific meaning. Like it's raining cats and dogs. Like, obviously, you don't have actual cats and dogs falling from the sky, but there's a play on words. The problem is Tokipona itself is literally a play on words. Like, everything in the language has so many different meanings. So let's have a look at how they translate their proverbs. So we'll start with the English. People are more important than money. Now, let's look at how this is done as a proverb. Yan lisulimute, money lisuli lili, which literally translates as, are you ready? People are important. Money is not important. Or money is important a little bit. It's a little bit important. Not much of a proverb, but yeah, I think it's kind of cool anyway. But the section that I actually like the most in this book is this section right here. So this section goes through each page goes through like a major religious text and takes a section of it and translates it into Tokipona. So here we've got the Torah. And then I can't really read that backwards. What is that? And the gospel. Then we've got Luke. We've got we've got the Koran here. And we've even got some of the writings of the Bahai. So I am a massive fan of, I guess, cultures and subcultures and subcommunities in a way. And I consider religions almost like a separate culture that exists within a greater culture in a lot of different ways. And I find their traditions, beliefs, practices, everything about them to be absolutely fascinating. The only problem is I'm an atheist and I don't believe in God, but I do really enjoy exploring and looking into different religions and communities around the world. So when I saw that translated the Tokipona, that's really cool because it just kind of shows that it can be used in all sorts of different ways. And it also shows that you have to be a very brave person to do the risk of translating some other person's religious text. Although I guess if you're the creator of the language, you can just claim that that's not a mistake and that is how the language is. And well, it's in the foundational document. Everyone has to agree now anyway. OK, the next book. Oh, I guess I should quickly say for this book, just here, if you're looking for just like a learning text, it does the job, but you can find plenty of learning materials online. You don't you don't need to get like this specific book for that. But if you want to have like the book, well, Jesus, my computer, if you want to have like a book that actually shows what am I trying to say? OK, if you want to get the book that shows the language as it currently stands, like as what is solidified as the language, then this is the book. It's kind of like a historical thing in a way. Now, the next one is the Tokipana dictionary. Now, this one, if you're going to get any book in Tokipana, you've got to get this one because this here is just so useful. As soon as I got it, I found myself just constantly referring to it. So what is it? Well, it's a dictionary, but it's kind of cool because it was created via basically polling the community about how they would say specific sentences and phrases or specific concepts in a way. And then whatever bubbled to the top as being like the most common way of saying something, the most common construction, that then basically made its way into the dictionary with a little number that goes above it. And that number represents like how solidified as an expression that is among the speakers of Tokipana. So I'm just going to flick through this book now and give you an example. OK, so I've just picked up a random example here. It is conservative. So you'll see those little numbers. It's got a I think that's a two. Yeah, it's a two. So it means that this is it's kind of common way of saying it, but there hasn't really been a really one particular expression that's been solidified. But let's look at the two top suggestions. So the top one is Nassan awen. And if you literally translate that awen, that means like to stay or to continue or to protect. And Nassan is like the way the path, maybe even the ideology or the thinking in a way. So Nassan awen is like to stay the path or to continue the ideology or to protect the ideology, which I guess is what a conservative is. But then you've got a slightly longer. And I would say a better suggestion. But this would be something you'd use to clarify at the beginning of a conversation that this is what you're talking about. And that is Nassan awen, p-tempopini, which is the exact same thing, the first part, which is like someone who continues or stays the path or the ideology, but p-tempopini, which means of the past, which is what a conservative is. There's someone who sticks to the traditions, basically. So this here is a really handy book to have specifically when you're just like struggling to think about how you would simplify a concept, because a lot of people have already struggled and have created this book. And I feel like this is going to become like my main go to reference book of any book for a while. OK, now. The last book, this one, I kind of grabbed as an impulse right at the very last moment. I had a couple of reviews and they're all good. So I was like, OK, I'm going to grab this one. Learning Language Tokipona. Now, first up, the text in this book is actually quite large, like the font compared to the others. So it could actually be smaller. It kind of tricks you of its size. But it's actually quite information dense. Now, it's a course just like the other, the actual original one here. But the difference is this one actually doesn't just teach you the grammar. It teaches you ways to say things which are things you would need to say quite often. So, for example, talking about time or talking about numbers or talking about body parts and stuff like that. And then like specifically talk about specific body parts, like how you would talk about this and that. And then that allows you to then start forming proper sentences. And it basically works by teaches you something that gives you some exercises. You do the exercises and then after the exercises, you check your understanding. Now, all that's cool. But I'm not really like, as I said, a grammar person. But what I do love about this book is that it's got entire sections or pages of stories written out in Tokipona and then a complete translation in English. So if you have a look here. Lesson 23, story time. So you got Tokipona all down that page there. And then I'm assuming I think it's like the next page or the page before it. It actually has the exact same thing in English. So you can read it, then check your understanding, which is something that's really important with a language that can be so ambiguous to make sure that you're actually learning the core meaning of the words in a way that they're actually meant to be used because they cover a lot of semantic ground and you want to make sure that you've got a core understanding of where that semantic center is for that for that word or that concept, I guess. But that's what I really like, because as I said, comprehensible input while reading a story, that's a form of comprehensible input. If you understand, like the vast majority of the words, which I do. So I'm going to basically spend a lot of time reading those stories, rereading over them. I may even record them just for myself and listen back to them in order to practice listening to the language as well. So that is basically the three books that I've got. There was a few other books online, but I wasn't sure if I should pick them up. If you guys have got any Tokipona book suggestions, totally hit me up in the comments below. Also, they don't have to be physical books. Like if there's any famous stories that have been translated into Tokipona, maybe from English or something that you think I would know about, totally let me know because very soon I'm going to move away and I'm just going to smash read a ton of stories in Tokipona in order to just like absorb the language further, because obviously there's a limitation to how much you can get through just video content alone. That is it. This video has gone on for way too long. I hope I didn't bore you guys. I'll see you all next time.