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". It can also only mean "enemy" if it's a person, because of the jan. See Lexicalization.
• 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". They are roughly the same. There could be a distinction if you want food for some other purpose than to eat it.
• While nasa is defined in Toki Pona: The Language of Good as "stupid", that meaning is no longer accepted or understood by the community due to ableism, and has been replaced as of Toki Pona Dictionary for this reason. See nasa on lipu Linku.

Day 4 - Adjectives

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

Day 5 - la

• In general, A la B 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. Some speakers' names are completely made of common (non-proper) nouns, anyway.
• akesi really only means "reptile" or "amphibian", which is reflected in Toki Pona Dictionary.

Day 9 - Adpositions

• anpa can also mean "bottom" or "area below". lon anpa is used much more commonly than lon noka for below. lon noka can specifically mean "at the foot of; resting at the same level as the lowest part". If lon anpa is contrasted, it would mean "completely underneath the lowest part".

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. See Synonyms.