“Mi jo e soweli lili tu. soweli mi li moku e kala.”*

Only around 100 people in the world understand this language. This is Toki Pona, created in 2001 by Sonja Lang, a Toronto-based linguist, and I’m one of a group of 17 who recently took on a challenge to learn it in 48 hours. Being far from a natural linguist myself – mere mention of verb conjugation brings me out in a cold sweat – this might have seemed like folly.

To attempt it, we gathered in the East London warehouse that is the head office of Memrise, an online platform for language-learning. Our group is mixed, although the majority seem to speak at least one additional language. Prem Gill, a 22-year-old student of marine geography from Reading, jokes that the TokiPonathon is his easy route to bilingualism: “By the weekend, there’s going to be a whole community that can speak in Toki Pona that wasn’t there a week ago.”

With many people haunted by negative experiences of learning languages at school, Memrise co-founder Ben Whately hopes that learning this simple language might produce a re-assessment of our potential for language acquisition.

“We want to try and create that magical moment ... that point when you are able to understand someone speaking in another language without having to methodically translate it back into your native tongue. But all at a hyped-up speed,” he explains.

Toki Pona has only 120 words and uses only 14 letters. The grammar is simple and few words have more than two syllables. This simplicity forces creativity with compounds, offering insights into the minds of speakers in the process. Coffee might be “telo pimaje wawa” (powerful dark liquid) to some and “telo ike mute” (very bad liquid) to another. The language has no distinct geographical base so compounds can differ between speakers with different mother tongues.

The first thing we do at the TokiPonathon is to get stuck into the vocabulary. Using existing Memrise software, a game-like resource with “educational memes” (mnemonics, etymologies, amusing videos) to help you remember, and algorithms to present you with words at the point at which your brain is about to forget them – the majority had learned all of the vocabulary by lunchtime. Plugged into my laptop, I felt like Neo learning kung fu.

After lunch, when learning vocabulary turned into trying to construct sentences, earlier elation began to go “ike lili” (a bit bad). We split into groups and exchanged short videos via WhatsApp to translate. Many had eureka moments. For Rob Shearme, a Cambridge natural sciences undergraduate, “it was almost emotionally overwhelming at points.” But for some – myself included – this was where things started to get difficult.

I tried to stay positive and I’m glad I did. Day two was genuinely astonishing to witness. People who had known none of this language 24 hours earlier spent the morning speaking nothing but Toki Pona. We played pictionary, consequences, and made videos, all in Toki Pona. Many had already found ways to order their thoughts. While for me it involved hot cheeks and was reminiscent of GCSE maths class, this was just a question of pace.

Part of Lang’s aim in creating the language was to simplify her own thoughts and to be able to express a lot using few words. “The benefit that it had for me,” she explains, “is that there’s times that I was thinking so much and so fast … that I had to slow down.”

The language uses words from English, Esperanto, Finnish, Croatian, Georgian, Dutch, Chinese, but with changed meanings. Toki Pona is often compared to the island languages of the Pacific in sound. This fits the image Lang had for Toki Pona of being spoken by people on a small island, living on the beach.

Toki Pona’s philosophy appealed to 22-year-old Oliver Mayeux and 26-year-old Marta Krzeminska, who both speak several languages and met while studying at Soas in London. They started learning it last February and were on hand to help at the TokiPonathon.

They described how learning the language was not without its unique challenges. Krzeminska used to wait for Mayeux at the monsi pi tomo lipu (the bottom/back of the library) but he often went to a different spot because he would have described the same place as anpa pi tomo lipu (the lower part of the library) or uta pi tomo lipu (the mouth or entrance of the library).

Yet if I had started feeling disheartened by the Toki Pona experience, speaking to this pair made me want to arrange a masterclass for me and my pals as soon as possible. “We realised that we were in our own little world and we wanted to have our own secret language ... If you talk things through in Toki Pona then it cuts out so much bullshit,” Mayeux explains. Krzeminska agreed: “It makes you really mindful of why you are saying certain things and whether they are necessary”.

I ask Mayeux what he thinks Toki Pona can teach us about language learning. “That it’s a hell of a lot easier than you’d expect,” he says. And not just because it’s so finite? “I don’t think so, because I bet you that it’s just as easy to learn 120 French words ... the human mind has an almost infinite capacity for learning language.” In the end, this reminder was perhaps the greatest lesson.

*For non-Toki Pona speakers, I’m saying I have two fish-eating cats.

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