First, What's Toki Pona?
Short answer: A constructed language with only 120 root words.
Longer answers can be found here
Wiki &
tokipona.org
The language is designed to be simple, minimalist, and somewhat universal. But, the specifics aren't that important to the original question.
Could learning toki pona benefit an aging population?
The point is that the language work very different from ours. With 120 words you need to combine words and thoughts in new ways. You need to conceptualize things differently. More to the point you have to think differently and, from what I've read, thinking differently can be helpful in maintaining our mental faculties as we age.
So when I heard about this constructed language and how it works my first thought was "I should try to learn a bit of it" & the second was "could that be useful for preventing dementia?" I don't know enough about dementia to answer that question but, it did lead me to to another thought.
If learning a new language is supposed to be good for maintaining mental agility, wouldn't learning a language designed to make you think differently be the perfect choice?
I have looked at toki pona, but I haven't learned any, just read a bit & looked.
Learning toki pona is for that magical day in the future, when I have time to spare and nothing to fill it with. When a day like that comes along I can sit down and learn Toki Pona.
