12 Days of sona pi toki pona

12 days of sona pi toki pona is a video series created in 2015 by jan Misali that teaches the basics of toki pona.

The series consists of 12 episodes, each introducing one or more grammar concepts (except days 1 and 12), as well as 10 words from the pu vocabulary (day 12 also introduces the synonyms).

Each episode was created in one day, resulting in some minor mistakes. Despite this, 61% of respondents in the 2022 census used it to learn the language, almost twice as many as for pu. jan Misali is creating a new series as a replacement, titled toki pona lessons.

Corrections and commentary

Many of these corrections have been collected by ijo Son - thanks!

Day 2 - Sentence structure

• "jan ike" doesn't always mean "enemy", and only means "enemy" if it's a person (because of the "jan").
• "li" does not mean "is". "li" is a particle that comes before a predicate in a sentence

Day 3 - e

• "mi wile e moku" is not incorrect. "moku" can be a direct object in this sentence. "mi wile moku" means "i want to eat", but "mi wile e moku" means "i want food".
• While "nasa" is listed in lipu Pu with "stupid", that meaning is no longer accepted or understood by the community due to ableism. See "nasa" on lipu Linku

Day 4 - Adjectives

• "pi" does not mean "of". It only rebrackets adjectives. See pi

Day 5 - la

• "A la B", in general, means "in the context of A, B". This can be used for if-then statements, time-marking, and more, as discussed in the video.

Day 8 - On addressing

• you don't have to avoid having your name sounding like an official word if you don't want to.
• "akesi" really means "reptile" or "amphibian"

Day 9 - Adpositions

• "anpa" can also mean "bottom" or "area below", and "lon anpa" is used much more commonly than "lon noka" for below.

Day 11 - Full of eels

• "a" does not mean "so". it is just a particle used for emphasis. it can be used in a similar way to "so", but it has no meaning; it's just emphasis.
• jan Misali repeated "len" here. replace "len" with "supa", meaning "flat (horizontal) surface" (e.g. furniture)

Day 12 - Final day

• "kin", "oko", and "namako" are usually not the exact same as "a", "lukin", and "sin" respectively. You don't have to know the exact differences between them, but know that they are often not interchangeable. when in doubt, use "a", "lukin", and "sin".