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Learning Toki Pona

I picked up Toki Pona: The Language of Good. I thought it would be fun to learn a new language. I suppose that it's more practical to learn something like Spanish, which is the second most spoken language in the US, or Japanese, which would allow me to read books from Japan that haven't been translated/localized yet. However, a conlang like Toki Pona has its own appeal. It's hopefully going to be easier to learn due to its intentional simplicity, and learning the language is supposed to be a philosophical exercise itself rather than a means to an end.

As I have been following along with the book and completing exercises, I have been bothered by the macOS Notes app complaining that my Toki Pona writing isn't spelled correctly or autocorrecting my words into English. I thought to myself, "is it possible to teach macOS to recognize Toki Pona and not complain, or even recognize correct Toki Pona spelling?" Luckily, someone has already assembled a dictionary that you can add to any system that supports .dic files. Thanks, @increpare!

I tried adding the .dic and .aff file to ~/Library/Spelling, and logging out and in again, then going to System Settings > Language input methods, opening the Spelling: Automatic by language dropdown, hitting Set Up and then being sure to enable the tokipona_tok library and dragging it up high enough in your 'order' (I dragged it below English).

...and, it works! It's auto-detected that the document is in Toki Pona!

a screenshot of the Notes app, which shows that all of the English words are now 'spelling errors'

Oh. Whoops. It looks like the macOS spellcheck doesn't support both English and Toki Pona in the same document. That's unfortunate. I should just disable spellcheck entirely, or remove the English and just have the exercise solutions. I chose to use the Notes app because I wanted my 'workbook' to be synced to all of my Apple devices, so I could work on my laptop or iPad. Oh well!