I plan on going abroad in the coming year & want to know enough of the local language to ask basic things. Does anyone know something like 100 or 250 words that I could memorize to get across basic ideas & questions? I don’t care about being grammatical correct just enough to cave man speak during my time there.
Toki pona is a conlang meant to be a simple as possible, and has less than ~150 words. Might be useful to look at those “essential” words.
Toki Pona doesn’t work like that, each word has multiple meanings, it’s made to be generic. For example Tawa means move, go, away, etc and Mi means me, we, us, mine, ours, etc. But Mi Tawa which literary means I go is used to mean Bye. Or Akesi which means disgusting animal or lizard and Linja which means long, flexible, cord, etc. So a Snake is an Akesi Linja.
That…seems like a language i could learn, and could probably be taught in schools as a second language.
I feel like the only reason we use English as much as we do is tradition. Time to break tradition.
To be fair though, speaking as a fan of toki pona, it’s important to point out that it is far from a list of essential words, it’s intentionally not designed to be able to communicate a majority of essential concepts clearly. It’s designed to be able to communicate simple, positive concepts easily, but to require thought and ambiguity to communicate negative or complex concepts. It’s literally meant to make you have to think more positively.