Learn Igbo: The Free App I Built for My Own Language

Most of what I publish here is about AI. This one is about something else, built over countless nights.

Igbo is my language. It has tens of millions of speakers and it’s losing them. So many of us understand it and can’t answer back: children who follow every word an elder says and reply in English, whose own children then grow up not hearing Igbo at all.

I built Asụsụ Ọma so we can answer back, and so our children grow up speaking it.

What’s in it

If you go looking for a way to learn Igbo today, you find scattered word lists, a few videos, and PDFs that give you spellings with no indication of how anything sounds. The large language apps don’t teach it at all.

Asụsụ Ọma teaches it in short lessons, about ten minutes each, running in order along a path so you never have to work out what to study next. Every phrase is a recording of a native speaker rather than a synthetic voice, mine among them. That matters more in Igbo than in most languages, because tone is part of the word: the same spelling with different tone marks can mean something else entirely.

Behind the lessons there are over a thousand recordings of native speakers, each tied to a word page with its tone-marked spelling and the sentences it’s really used in. Around them there are games built from the words you’ve already learned, and Igbo folktales read aloud by native speakers, where any word can be tapped for its meaning and pronunciation.

There’s an Android app on Google Play, in beta while testing runs, and on iPhone it installs to the home screen straight from the browser. Either way it keeps working offline once the lessons are cached, which matters on an uneven connection.

Everything in it is free, and it stays that way

No ads, no subscription, no premium tier, no lesson locked behind a payment. Every lesson, game, folktale and recording is yours from the first day.

Igbo is losing speakers with every generation. The last thing it needs is a price on the door. A language survives when the next generation can reach it, and a paywall would shut out exactly the people who need it most.

Who it’s for

Complete beginners, and people like me who grew up around Igbo and were never taught to speak it properly. Either way it starts at the first greeting.

If that’s you, or someone in your family, it’s at asusuoma.com.