Writing toki pona with 汉字 (Chinese characters)

Toki pona is easily written with one symbol per word. Those symbols are usually sitelen pona, a system unique to toki pona. As toki pona is relatively obscure (around ten thousand speakers), a writing system unique to it adds avoidable challenge to learning the language. By the same obscurity, sitelen pona is absent from Unicode, making it harder to use on computers.

Conveniently, some millions of people are already familiar with a certain large set of symbols, available in Unicode, roughly used to represent words. I refer, of course, to 汉字, i.e. Chinese characters. Each 汉字 has an associated pronunciation and meaning. The meaning associates more closely, insofar as 汉字 are reused in Japanese (and, historically, Korean and Vietnamese) mostly based on meaning.

Some 200 relatively simple 汉字, called radicals, combine to make most others. Conveniently, toki pona has around 137 words, which is notably less than 200. It seems particularly feasible to reuse 汉字 radicals in place of sitelen pona.

The 汉字 radicals vary widely in how easily we can associate them with toki pona words. Some of them mean weirdly specific things, or are rarely understood on their own, such as 亠 or 冂. Some of them are very easy to pair up.

A full 汉字 radical assignment for toki pona would go much further than this. To finish it, we'd keep pairing radicals to toki pona words with decreasingly-matched meaning, until the only remaining radicals have especially niche or obscure meanings, such as 卩, and the only remaning toki pona words are vague grammatical glue, such as "li" or "e". Write those last toki pona words with radicals chosen by pronunciation.