Comment by 🌧️ jsv
Re: "I’d like to learn an auxiliary language: Esperanto,…"
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.
2025-04-13 · 1 year ago
1 Later Comment
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.
Original Post
I’d like to learn an auxiliary language: Esperanto, Interlingua, Occidental, or Toki Pona. Which one would you recommend, and why?