I have read the toki pona book.  Its interesting but cheaty.<p>You can&#x27;t get rid of complexity by squeezing a balloon and pretending the enormous bulging out shared dictionary of nouns is &quot;not really words&quot;.<p>English only has 26 letters, its really simple to learn English!  Well, sure, sometimes you have to string together quite a few of those 26 letters in the correct order to get the point across, but its not really hard to learn English.<p>Likewise toki pona is an exercise in what amounts to stringing together long winded syllables.<p>It was disappointing, I was interested in the language with the idea of fooling around with natural language processing, which is complex, so a simpler language should allow easier to write simple toys.  Perhaps I&#x27;ve found a silver bullet?  Yet its actually a very complicated language because of the balloon analogy, you can&#x27;t squeeze the complexity somewhere else and declare victory.  It requires all kinds of memorization and life experience and humor and creativity and judgment calls about stringing together it&#x27;s sylableWords into what in English would mostly be one word.<p>Even if its not a silver bullet, its still kind of cool.  I ended up having more fun, while continuing to accomplish nothing, with a pidgin englishs.  I ended up with a reasonable parser for butler english.  I thought it would be funny to write a parser that turned butler english into coq and then replied back to me with what coq thought of my statements.  Then I realized I was bored and moved on to something else.  For at least awhile recreational natural language processing can be a lot of fun and is a wide open area where whatever you do, its probably a newly trodden path, at least if its weird enough.  Here&#x27;s a strange idea if I get back into the hobby.  Can I make a butler english to toki pona automated translator?  Hmm.