Why I Built a Free App to Learn Igbo
Igbo has tens of millions of speakers and almost nowhere to learn it properly. Asụsụ Ọma is my answer: guided lessons, real Igbo voices, games and folktales, free for everyone.
Most of what I write here is about JavaScript and AI. This one is about my own language, and the app I built so people can learn it.
The gap
Igbo is my language. It has tens of millions of speakers and it is losing them, a little more with every generation. I built this so that the Igbo language and culture can live on.
If you go looking for a way to learn Igbo, you find 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. That's the gap Asụsụ Ọma exists to fill.
What it does
It teaches Igbo in short lessons, about ten minutes each, running in order along a path so you never have to decide what to study next. Every phrase is a recording of a native speaker rather than a synthetic voice, which matters more in Igbo than in most languages: tone is part of the word, so a wrong tone is a different word. Behind the lessons there are over a thousand such recordings, each tied to a word page with its tone-marked spelling and the sentences it's really used in.
Around the lessons 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.
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.
The one technical note
It's a PWA, which for a project like this was the right call rather than a fashionable one. The audience is spread across Nigeria and the diaspora, on wildly uneven connections, so the lessons and the recordings are cached and keep working offline once you've opened them. 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.
That's as far as I'll go into the build here. The point of the thing isn't the stack.
If this is for you
It is 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.
It's at asusuoma.com, and it costs nothing.