How to Learn Igbo: A Free App With Real Igbo Voices

Igbo is my language. If you've ever tried to learn it, you already know the problem. The big language apps don't teach Igbo. What you find instead is a scattering of word lists, a few videos, and PDFs that give you spellings with no idea how any of it sounds.

That gap is why I built Asụsụ Ọma, a free app to learn Igbo. It's taken countless nights.

My own language is losing speakers

Igbo has tens of millions of speakers, and it's still slipping. So many of us understand it and can't answer back. I've watched it happen in my own family: children who follow every word an elder says and reply in English, whose children will 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've ever stood in front of a relative, understood everything, and had nothing to say, you know the feeling.

What's in it

Guided lessons. Short ones, about ten minutes. They run in order along a path so you never have to work out what to study next, and each one ends with something you can say.

Real Igbo voices. Every phrase is a recording of a native speaker, mine among them, not a synthetic voice. Tone changes meaning in Igbo, so a wrong tone is a wrong 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.

Games. Memory match and a lightning round, built from the words you've already learned, so the practice is never random.

Folktales. Igbo stories like Mbe na Udele, read aloud by native speakers, with any word tappable 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. Once the lessons are cached it keeps working offline, which matters on a bad 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.

A language survives when the next generation can reach it. Putting Igbo behind a paywall would shut out exactly the people who need it most.

Who it's for

Two groups, mostly. Beginners starting from nothing, and people like me who grew up around Igbo and were never taught to speak it properly. Both are welcome, and it starts from the first greeting either way.

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