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AFP 20 – Sonja Lang: Toki Pona, Conlanging and the meaning of life

by
(Last Updated On: April 27, 2020)

Today is a very exciting episode on the Actual Fluency Podcast. Today I'm happy to present Sonja Lang, the creator of Toki Pona on the show. I had communicated briefly with Sonja over Facebook before meeting her in person in Berlin. The Toki Pona presentation, done by my friend Chris Huff, was one of the most popular ones so I KNEW I had to get Sonja on the show to pick her brain on languages, conlanging and Toki Pona of course.

Toki Pona is a constructed language that works like a pidgin, that is to say it is minimalist language with a vocabulary of only 120 words. This means that it is incredibly easy to learn, but it also lacks the finer details a full language can offer. I am going to learn Toki Pona this year after I'm done with my 3 month Esperanto challenge.

I hope you enjoy the interview with Sonja!

Toki Pona book giveaway

Sonja has generously decided to sponsor a copy of her newly published book on Toki Pona to a lucky listener. All you need to do to enter the competition is to write a comment below. The winning comment will be selected by Sonja, so make sure to make your comment special.

Ideas for comments: Language experiences that changed your life, life decisions based on languages. In general though, just be creative 🙂

The Episode

Show Notes

In this episode you will hear about:

  • How Sonja came up with Toki Pona
  • How she got into conlanging
  • Her other language experiences
  • How she used conlanging as a sort of meditation for the soul
  • Why she decided to study Finnish
  • And much more!

Resources mentioned in the Episode

Note: I've removed most of the resources from this section, as I always had Anki/Memrise etc. here every week. Now I will only put resources here that are very exclusive to the episode. For any other resource please go to the resource page here for more information.

Kris is the founder of Actual Fluency, and has spent the last 8 years becoming an expert in language learning software, methods, and techniques.

Originally from Denmark, he now lives in Portugal and speaks 5+ languages at varying levels. His other interests are Wine, Online Marketing, and Travelling.