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. So many of us understand it and cannot 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 this so we can answer back, and so our children grow up speaking it.
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 do not teach it. That is 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. There are 642 Igbo word pages on the site, each with its own recording and a tone-marked spelling.
Around the lessons there are games built from the words you have already learned, and Igbo folktales told in simple Igbo where any word can be tapped for its meaning.
It is free. No ads, no subscription, no premium tier, and nothing held back for a payment. A language that is losing speakers does not need a price on the door.
The one technical note
It is 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 have opened them. It installs to the home screen on both platforms from the browser, with no store gatekeeping between a person and the language.
That is as far as I will go into the build here. The point of the thing is not the stack.
If this is for you
Two kinds of people use it: complete beginners, and people like me who understand Igbo but were never taught to speak it properly. Either way it starts at the first greeting.
It is at asusuoma.com, it costs nothing, and it always will.