Toki Pona Trainer

This is my entry for the 2022 Mini Micro New Year Jam.  As a nod to the jam theme of fusion, this game is a fusion of a typing tutor and a spaced-repetition drill system for three different writing systems for toki pona.

What is Toki Pona?
Toki Pona is a constructed language developed by Sonja Lang in the early 2000s.  It's noted for being particularly small — only about 120 words.  Yet it's complete enough to express a wide variety of thoughts.  Because of the very small vocabulary and simple grammar, toki pona is one of the easiest foreign languages to learn.

Also because there is such a limited set of words, toki pona is ideally suited to a logographic writing system, where each word is represented by one character.  While not familiar to most Westerners, major languages of the world use logographic systems, including Chinese and Japanese.  These writing systems work because they are very efficient: our brains can identify a pictographic symbol much more quickly (and with higher resistance to noise or degradation) than a pattern of letters.

While toki pona can be represented perfectly will with ordinary ASCII letters, and indeed most people use it this way, it's an ideal opportunity to experience what a logographic writing system is like.

What are the three writing systems?

This game teaches three different writing systems, each with its own strengths:

1. Sitelen pona, the logographs created by Sonja Lang herself.  These are very writable, but are not standard Unicode characters, which makes them somewhat difficult to work with in a modern computing environment.
2. Sitelen emoji, a system developed in recent years to represent each toki pona word with a standard Unicode emoji.  These emoji were chosen to represent the meaning of each word, or to resemble the corresponding sitelen pona glyphs, or both.  So they are relatively easy to remember and read, and easy to use on a computer, but difficult to write by hand.
3. Sitelen kanji, a system that uses Chinese/Japanese characters (Hanzi/Kanji) to represent most words, with pona-like mathematical symbols for the particles (small words that play grammatical roles in a sentence).  These are all valid Unicode characters, very writable, and easy for users of Asian languages to remember, though somewhat harder for those without such a background.

I've attached a handy Cross-Reference Chart you can download and keep handy to see how the three writing systems relate.

In the game, you can choose to include any combination of these writing systems.