Interested in learning a new language, but don’t want to put in much effort? If yes, you should check out CG’s new Toki Pona Club!
After hearing that, you may think to yourself, what is Toki Pona? Don’t worry, you aren’t alone in asking that – it’s the most common question around it.
“[It’s] a language with only 120 words, and the point of the club is to try to learn this language and try to figure out how we can better define the things around us based on not just words, but what they really mean to us,” said sophomore Parker Woestman, one of the founders of the club.
Given that most people don’t know about Toki Pona, the focus of the club is currently on building familiarity with it.
“We mainly do lessons on Toki Pona because we’re all still learning the language. We teach grammar and we teach content words,” Woestman said. “Eventually the goal is to be able to play a bunch of different Toki Pona-based games like charades in the club.”
Toki Pona is a global language – Wikipedia considers it the world’s second-most widely spoken constructed language – but its presence at CG is a recent development.
“A friend, [sophomore] Ascher Lowes, and I started the club in order to create a fun learning space for people to experiment with languages,” Woestman said. “He actually tried to start this club last year but we weren’t able to get enough support from other students or teachers. Asher pioneered it after trying again this year with outreach to a lot more students and eventually got the support of a lot of students, and it’s easier to help supervise the club.”
Woestman loves the language and is pleased to see so many other students taking an interest in it. He hopes it will continue to grow in its first full year at CG next year.
“In the future I would like to see the students in the club learning to be able to teach other students the language of Toki Pona,” he said. “A big part of the club is the fact that it’s student-led and is really student-oriented, so being able to see the students take control and teach other students” is the goal.
If you need one more reason to join the club, Woestman has some words of wisdom and encouragement: “lon. mi ken toki kepeken toki pona.”
If you don’t know what that means, there’s only one way to find out: Join the Toki Pona Club next year!