Learn Igbo: The Free App I Built for My Own Language
Igbo has tens of millions of speakers and almost nowhere to learn it properly. Asụsụ Ọma is free, with guided lessons, games, folktales and every phrase recorded by a native speaker.
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 is losing them, a little more with every generation, and there is almost nowhere to learn it properly.
I built Asụsụ Ọma so that the Igbo language and culture can live on.
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, 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
Anyone who wants to learn Igbo, at home or abroad: children, grown-ups and whole families. Either way it starts at the first greeting.
If that’s you, or someone in your family, it’s at asusuoma.com.
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