I’d like to learn an auxiliary language: Esperanto, Interlingua, Occidental, or Toki Pona. Which one would you recommend, and why?
Posted in: s/Language_Acquisition
2025-04-13 · 1 year ago · 👍 aRubes, skf
8 Comments ↓
🤖 vismate · 2025-04-13 at 10:15:
I'd choose Esperanto as it's one of the most popular constructed languages. It has the most resources and fellow speakers available.
On the other hand I find Toki Pona the most interesting from your list. It's more of a philosophy than an actually useful language to communicate with. It affects the way you think way more than other conlangs because you need a lot of creativity to properly describe a given concept.
🍄 leotho · 2025-04-13 at 10:47:
I can reccomend Esperanto, there’s lots of reading material out there and it’s not too hard to find speakers to practice with. Toki Pona is fairly simple, so if you wanted you could probably pick it alongside Esperanto once you’ve got a grasp of the basics.
🦋 CarloMonte · 2025-04-13 at 14:15:
Esperanto appears to have a strong indoeuropean structure (grammar: structure and inflection). If you are happy to learn spanish after knowing italian, french and portuguese, then go ahead. If you want something radically different, than try Toki Pona :).
☕️ tenno-seremel · 2025-04-13 at 15:47:
I’d say go with Esperanto for reasons already mentioned. Toki pona is amusing in its own way, but somewhat context‐dependant – for many words there is no “official” translation, you just approximate the meaning and wing it. You can learn both, though.
🍀 gritty · 2025-04-13 at 16:16:
martin, over on Station, is heavily invested in Esperanto. He has some videos and language learning software I believe.
🍀 gritty · 2025-04-13 at 16:23:
his site
Esperanto probably has more speakers and literature than the rest put together, it’s the safest choice here.
Toki Pona has relatively many speakers, but not many things to read (it might have more really cool writing systems invented for it than it has books). Besides, Toki Pona is not really an auxlang. There is Toki Ma, that aims to be Toki Pona-based auxlang, but it is nowhere as popular as its parent language.
The other two… they are not very popular, and if you want to learn an obscure auxlang just for the fun of it, there are more interesting projects, in my opinion. I wouldn’t recommend any of them as the first one to learn, in any case.
I'd recommend Toki Pona because:
- It's fun.
- Low skill floor, high skill ceiling.
- Community thinks out of the box so there's a lot of adjacent stuff like different scripts.
Basically Toki Pona is the Gemini of conlangs.
You are not going to use any auxlang for utilitarian communication anyways, so you might as well choose something very different -- popularity or number of speakers won't make a difference, so I'd ignore that metric.
Try all for a week and then choose.