I agree with you that toki pona doesn't feel very similar to English overall. Other similarities to English: use of prepositions, something like an accusative

I agree with you that toki pona doesn't feel very similar to English overall. Other similarities to English: use of prepositions, something like an accusative case (though marked differently from English). Frequently being willing to use the same word as both a verb and a noun (without any morphological changes). Other differences: adjectives follow the nouns they modify (like in Romance): jan lili, soweli suli, tenpo seli, tenpo pimeja, telo kasi. English would say small person, large animal, warm time, dark time, herbal beverage. No participles, no relative clauses, no general word for "and", no comparatives. Particles are super-weird from an English point of view, especially li and la.