Learn Swahili

Start at the alphabet

The Swahili on-ramp is written by hand, not generated, and it is 196 cards long. Every card is spoken in a recorded Swahili voice, and what you get right is scheduled for review rather than shown again at random.

• 33letters
• 10digits
• 13pronunciation rules
• 100core words
• 20everyday phrases
• 20sentences

Three of the pronunciation cards, exactly as the course teaches them:

• a — always “ah” as in “father” — a vowel NEVER changes value from word to wordbaba — father
• e — always “eh” as in “bed” — never the English “ee”meza — table
• i — always “ee” as in “see” — never the English “eye”kiti — chair

Then material that does not run out

Once you are reading, the level is the point. Make a text writes Swahili 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.

What Swahili actually costs a beginner

The vowels are the whole of the early work, and the work is unlearning English. a is always ah, e is always eh and never ee, i is always ee and never eye, and no vowel is ever reduced to an uh however unstressed it is. That last habit is the hard one to break, and it is what makes an English speaker's Swahili hard to follow. Beyond the sounds, Swahili's real subject is the noun-class system — every noun belongs to a class, and the class agrees across the whole sentence — which the course meets in sentences rather than as a table of prefixes.