A FlashBoss Toki Pona flashcard on the terminal screen: the target word, an example sentence with its translation, and the notes beneath.

Base game · included free

toki pona

A whole language. Around 140 words.

Listen · Read · Repeat · Rate · Fight

You begin with toki! — hello. Five hundred cards later there is nothing left of the language to meet. Free, inside the base game.

Toki Pona core design

The whole language, not a slice

toki pona — the language of good.

Toki Pona is a constructed language built as an experiment in minimalism: around 140 words, and a question underneath them — how much can you say with almost nothing? There are no tenses to conjugate, no genders to memorise, no irregular anything. Spelling is phonetic: say what you see, and you have said it right.

What is left is combination. tomo tawa, a moving structure, is a car. ilo toki, a talking tool, is a telephone. And because the vocabulary is so small, each word has to stretch: pona is good, simple, useful and kind at once. You stop reaching for the exact word and start deciding what you actually meant — which is the point of the whole exercise.

Most languages are too big to finish. This one is not. FlashBoss teaches all of it in 500 cards across 22 clusters and 5 tiers: 178 single-word entries — every content word and every grammar particle the course teaches, the book vocabulary plus the community words that have earned their place beside it — 250 compound phrases, and 72 sentences built from them.

Tier 1

First words, people and pronouns, good and bad, wanting and coming.

Tier 2

Work and origins, feelings and food, home and tools, giving and playing.

Tier 3

Sleep and sunlight, ways and books, numbers and money, sound and community.

Tier 4

Death and cycles, sky and air, body and darkness, heat and plants, fruit and family.

Tier 5

Moons and clothing, colours and creatures, birds and beasts — and the bonus words.

The whole pack, counted

Five tiers, twenty-two clusters

Each cluster ends in a boss fight. Beat it and those cards leave your daily deck for good.

TierClustersCardsWhat you meet
Tier 1486The first words, people and pronouns, good and bad, wanting and coming. Seven grammar lessons land here — you are making sentences on day one.
Tier 2491Work and origins, feelings and food, home and tools, giving and playing.
Tier 3491Sleep and sunlight, ways and books, numbers and money, sound and community.
Tier 45114Death and cycles, sky and air, body and darkness, heat and plants, fruit and family.
Tier 55118Moons and clothing, colours and creatures, birds and beasts, and two clusters of bonus words from beyond the book.
Total22500One pack. The complete language.
Watch it grow up

Progressively more challenging

The example sentences increase in complexity tier by tier.

  1. mi jan pona sina.I am your friend.
  2. sina wile e pona la, sina o pali.If you want good things, you should work for them.
  3. jan pi sona pona li toki e nasin pona tawa jan lili.The wise person teaches the good way to children.
  4. jan sona li sona e ni: ona li sona ala e ale.A wise person knows this: they don't know everything.
  5. telo li tawa anpa lon nasin ale.Water always flows downward, whatever the path.
Build it from parts

Two small words, one new one

There are no genders to colour-code here — so FlashBoss shows you the thing that actually matters. A modifier always follows the word it modifies, and the pair means something neither half does alone. Two hundred and fifty cards in this pack are exactly that.

head — what the thing is modifier — what kind of thing it is
tomo tawa
cartomo (house, building, indoor space) + tawa (moving): a room that moves
ilo toki
telephoneilo (tool, device) + toki (to speak): a talking tool
ilo nanpa
computerilo (tool) + nanpa (number): the number machine
tomo lipu
librarytomo (building) + lipu (paper, book, document): the building of documents
telo nasa
alcoholtelo (water, liquid) + nasa (strange, intoxicated): the liquid that makes you strange
kasi suli
treekasi (plant, leaf) + suli (big, tall): the big plant

A handful of words that carry the rest

Four cards from the pack. Tap to flip.

the whole worldview
pona
pona!
good, simple, useful, kind, friendly; goodness, simplicity. On its own it means “great!” or “thanks!” One of the most-used words in the language, and half of its name.
tap to flip
particle
pi
ni li jan pi toki pona.
Regroups the words after it into one bunch, so a later describing word sticks to the whole group rather than only the last word — jan pi toki pona is a person of Toki Pona. “This is a Toki Pona speaker.”
tap to flip
particle
la
mi la, mi pona.
Sets the scene: everything before la is the when, the if, or the as-for of what follows. The language's all-purpose context marker. “As for me, I'm fine.”
tap to flip
community
kijetesantakalu
kijetesantakalu li moku e kala.
A raccoon, or a related animal in the raccoon and weasel family. Coined as an April Fools' joke in 2009 — the longest word in a language built on shortness. It stuck, and it is now one of the community's best-loved words.
tap to flip
Grammar, on time

Thirteen lessons, each at its own door

No grammar chapter to wade through first. Every particle gets a lesson, and that lesson fires at the exact card where the particle first appears — so you read the rule the moment you need it, and never before.

  • 00Welcome to Toki Ponafires at toki — card one
  • 01mi / sina need no ‘to be’fires at mi pona
  • 02li — the is/does linkfires at jan
  • 03o — commands and callsfires at o
  • 04pi — grouping modifiersfires at pi
  • 05Modifiers come afterfires at jan pona
  • 06Asking questionsfires at seme
  • 07Preverbs tint the verbfires at wile
  • 08la — setting the scenefires at ken la
  • 09e — marking the objectfires in tier 2
  • 10Numbers, few coloursfires at wan
  • 11Six small prepositionsfires at poka
  • 12nasin, pu and kufires at ku
Four languages in

You don't have to come through English

Every card carries its translation, its example translation and its notes in all four languages — and so does every one of the 13 lesson pages, and the interface around them. Set your language once, and the whole pack follows.

toki
toki!
English
to speak, talk, communicate, think; language, a conversation
Deutsch
sprechen, reden, denken; Sprache, Gespräch
日本語
話す、語る、考える;言語、会話
Español
hablar, conversar, comunicar, pensar; lengua, una conversación

It costs nothing

There is no Toki Pona DLC. There is nothing to add to a basket.

Included free

Toki Pona ships inside the base game, alongside the other free packs. Install FlashBoss, choose it from the language list, and start. It has no prerequisite pack either — run it beside your main language, or on its own.

How it sticks

Flashcards as an integrated system

Fibonacci SRS
Rate each card 0–5. The better you know a word, the longer before it returns — spaced repetition on Fibonacci intervals.
Boss fights
Each of the 22 clusters is gated by a duel you can't win without confronting and overcoming your most difficult words.
Graduation
Beat a cluster and its cards leave your daily deck for good. The deck gets smaller as you learn.
Compounding
Half the pack is compounds. Every content word you learn multiplies, because the next 250 cards are built out of words you already have.
Lessons
Thirteen reference lessons, each triggered at the card where its particle first appears.
Text-to-speech
Cards can be heard. Toki Pona is spoken by the game's neural text-to-speech engine, piper1-gpl, using the pack's native Esperanto voice — chosen because that voice was trained on exactly the phonemes Toki Pona uses, so all fourteen of its sounds come out as themselves, with the penultimate stress the language expects. It is synthesised speech, not a recording of a speaker.
Questions

Before you start

Is Toki Pona really free?

Yes. It is one of the packs inside the base game — there is no Toki Pona DLC to buy, and no upgrade behind the later tiers. All 500 cards and all 13 lessons are there from the first launch.

What exactly is in the pack?

500 cards over 22 clusters and 5 tiers: 178 single-word entries — every content word and every grammar particle the course teaches — plus 250 compound phrases and 72 whole sentences. You can read the entire word list before you start, on the word lists page.

Does it cover the community vocabulary as well as the book?

It does. The spine is the book vocabulary, and tier 5 carries the later words that stuck — kijetesantakalu, tonsi, misikeke — before closing on two clusters of bonus vocabulary from further out still: majuna (old), linluwi (a network), isipin (to ponder), nimisin (a new or joke word). The final lesson explains the difference between pu and ku, so you always know which room you are standing in.

Do I need to know English to use it?

No. Cards, lessons and the interface all run in English, German, Japanese and Spanish. Every one of the 500 cards carries its translation, its example translation and its notes in all four, and all 13 lessons exist in all four.

Where does the grammar come in?

At the door. There are 13 lessons and each one fires at the exact card where its particle first turns up — li arrives with jan, pi with pi, la with ken la. Eight of them land in tier 1. You can also read them all in advance on the lessons page.

Can I hear it?

Yes — through text-to-speech, not a recorded voice. Toki Pona has fourteen sounds and the pack speaks them through FlashBoss's native Esperanto voice, whose phoneme set covers all fourteen exactly, with the penultimate stress the language expects.

Do I have to finish another pack first?

No. Toki Pona has no prerequisite. It is a standalone course, and small enough to sit alongside whatever you are already learning without taking the room.

Take the whole language

Toki Pona is included in the base game. Nothing to buy, nothing to unlock.

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