Learn Amharic
Amharic is written in a script almost nobody outside Ethiopia and Eritrea can read, and that is the whole of the first hurdle — the language underneath it is regular. The fidel is a syllabary: each base shape carries a vowel, and six small systematic modifications to the shape change which vowel it carries. iLexiBox starts there, so the script stops being a wall on the first day.
Start at the fidel
The Amharic on-ramp is written by hand, not generated, and it is 199 cards long. Every card is spoken in a recorded Amharic voice, and what you get right is scheduled for review rather than shown again at random.
- 33base characters
- 10digits
- 16pronunciation rules
- 100core words
- 20everyday phrases
- 20sentences
Three of the pronunciation cards, exactly as the course teaches them:
- ሀ — first order — the plain base shape, with a short “ä” like the a in “sofa”ሀገር — country
- ሁ — second order — a small stroke hangs off the right side and adds “u”ሁለት — two
- ሂ — third order — the stroke drops to the foot and adds “i”ሂሳብ — bill / arithmetic
Then material that does not run out
Once you are reading, the level is the point. Make a text writes Amharic at the CEFR level, length, topic and format you ask for, so the step up is a setting rather than a new book. Speaking scores you word by word as you read aloud. Lexi talks back. The Translator fixes your mistakes as it translates and can give a simpler version at your level, and Writing marks what you wrote and says why.
Above the on-ramp sits the Course — a map of practice steps from A1 to C2 with grammar, vocabulary and a level test at the top of each level — and My words, where everything you save comes back on a spaced-repetition schedule in eight quiz styles.
2,720 photographs, 2,707 of them captioned in Amharic
The album is a photograph for every word, shelved by category, each caption written in Amharic and spoken in a real recorded voice rather than synthesised on the fly. It doubles as a game: see the picture, spell the word. Free to replay.
What Amharic actually costs a beginner
The cost is the size of the chart rather than its difficulty: thirty-three base characters times seven orders is a lot of shapes, and no cleverness reduces the number. What makes it learnable is that the modification is consistent — the same stroke hanging off the right side adds u whichever base it hangs from — so the course teaches the pattern on real words instead of drilling the grid. Beyond the script, what takes practice is the ejectives, made with the throat closed and released with a pop, which have no English equivalent and are on the audio for that reason.
Full courses in English and German (A1–C1); Norwegian growing level by level; first lessons in Spanish; picture album in 37 languages; tools and AI practice in 54.