When learning a new language, there is always one rule everyone will be telling you about: "Consistency is key!"
Probably this is a saying you will hear about a lot more things than just learning languages. When trying to achieve pretty much any goal, consistency is one of the biggest factors in collective wisdom. And I have disregarded collective wisdom...
About 3 and a half months ago, I've set out to learn Toki Pona, a constructed language with only around 120 words in total. I wanted to do so by using ChatGPT and AI.
At first, it went pretty well. I studied every night for about an hour or so, using lectures generated by ChatGPT. I also wrote an update 10 days after.
Problem is: That's when I stopped. It was still regularly on my mind, but I never took the time anymore to sit down and continue. Sure, I had made up my excuses: ChatGPT became fairly laggy with a too big chat history. But that was pretty much all in excuses I had.
Within these 10 days of learning, I achieved a level, that - as I would say - was fairly impressive. My skills achieved a level in which I felt comfortable saying, I could express some things in Toki Pona - way more than I would have expected for the limited time I put into learning.
There is a magazine, called "lipu tenpo", which I mentioned in a Snap. I tried reading articles in there. Quite obviously my experience was anything but comfortable. Calling my reading experience a torturous fight may be an understatement. But I was able to read some sentences, understand what some articles were about etc. That was a feeling, that gave me a pretty cool feeling.
But as I've stopped practicing my Toki Pona at that point, I never got to a point of fluency. And without knowing for sure, fluency feels like something that is a magic step on the ladder. Who achieves fluency, may rest from practicing with way less danger of losing progress. Those people that achieved fluency have it much easier to just read 3 sentences of Toki Pona a week, to make sure they still keep some practice. I, on the other hand, had no practice at all - for the last 3 months! There were no times I tried building random sentences in Toki Pona in my head. It would have cost a lot of mental capacity.
So in my current state, I no longer think I could read an article in "lipu tenpo" and understand what the article is about. I have lost way too many words of the vocabulary consisting of 120 words, to make out the gist of something, I have forgotten about too many grammatical constructions to understand what function a word has in relation to the other words around it.
But I want to continue this journey! I don't accept defeat, just because I was too lazy for a couple of weeks. I will continue to learn Toki Pona and come out fluent in a few months.
Follow me on my journey, as I will continue to write about it on Hive.
Image source: Pixabay/@Ralf1403