Launched this week
Asụsụ Ọma
Learn Igbo with guided lessons, real Igbo voices and games
13 followers
Learn Igbo with guided lessons, real Igbo voices and games
13 followers
Igbo has tens of millions of speakers and almost nowhere to learn it properly. Asụsụ Ọma is a free Igbo learning app: guided lessons, games, folktales, and every phrase recorded by a native speaker. No ads, no subscription, nothing behind a payment.
NextJob
Asụsụ Ọma is a free app for learning Igbo. I made it so that our Igbo culture can live on.
Igbo is spoken a little less with every generation. Many children of Igbo parents grow up understanding it and never learn to speak it, and their own children won't hear it at all. If we don't teach it now, in a way people can keep up with, we'll lose it one family at a time.
It's built as a village to learn in. The path runs seven stages from the family compound to the river, starting at your first greeting, so you never have to work out what to study next. Every phrase is a recording of a native speaker, mine among them. Tone is part of the word in Igbo, so the same spelling with different tones is a different word and synthesis gets it wrong. Tap any Igbo word anywhere in the app and you get its meaning, the tone-marked spelling, how it sounds, and the sentences it's really used in.
There's a games room where wins earn cowries, a market day of three quick tasks so a little practice happens even on a busy day, and Igbo folktales read aloud by native speakers, where you tap a word for its meaning and keep reading. Every screen is drawn and animated for the app, so a child can use it and an adult can have fun learning.
It works offline too. I built it as a PWA you can access anywhere on the web via asusuoma.com. It also has an Android app on Google Play, in beta while testing runs: asusuoma.com/android, and on iPhone it installs to the home screen from the browser: asusuoma.com/iphone. Everything in it is free: no ads, no subscription, no premium tier, nothing locked behind a payment. A language survives when the next generation can reach it, and putting Igbo behind a paywall would shut out exactly the people who need it most.