The newest course · 1,000 words out now
Learn Swahili with FlashBoss
The most regular language you will ever learn the hard way.
Listen · read · repeat · rate · fight
Swahili does not conjugate so much as assemble. A verb is built from slots in a fixed order, and every noun belongs to a class that the rest of the sentence agrees with. Learn those two machines and the vocabulary stops being a list. 1,000 words, 40 clusters, 20 reference lessons — with the class named on every noun.
A language with no irregular verbs to speak of
Swahili is the working language of East Africa — Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the eastern Congo — and it is spoken by far more people who learned it than by people born to it. That has worn it smooth. Spelling is exactly as it sounds, stress is always the second-to-last syllable, and there is no tone and no grammatical gender.
What it has instead is structure you can see. The verb is a train of slots. The noun carries a class, and the class rides through the whole sentence. Neither is hidden, and neither has a list of exceptions waiting for you at intermediate level.
This course teaches ordinary Swahili — the language of the market, the school and the news. The frequency backbone it is built from was made for that, not for subtitles.
Slots, in a fixed order
Three sentences from the pack's own cards, taken apart. The order never changes: who, when, whom, what.
The pack drills this directly. One of Swahili's three revision drills is the verb train, built slot by slot — you assemble the form rather than recall it whole.
Every noun carries its class
Swahili has no gender. It has classes — and the class of the noun decides the shape of its plural, its adjectives, its verb and its possessives. Get the class and the agreement comes free.
Those are the ten classes this pack actually uses, taken from its cards rather than from a grammar. The class is printed on every single noun in the deck, where another course would leave you to infer it.
What a card holds
A real one, from tier 2. The class sits beside the headword; the notes say the thing a dictionary would not.
Flashcards as an integrated system
- Cards
- 1,000 words across 40 clusters and five tiers — greetings and family, the town, work and health, government, the news, and the small words that join sentences together. An example sentence on every card.
- Noun class
- Named on every noun, on the card itself: ji/ma, ki/vi, m/wa. The engine the whole language runs on, never left implicit.
- Your language
- Translations and study notes in English, German, Japanese, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Spanish — full coverage on every card. Study Swahili through whichever you call home.
- Lessons
- 20 reference lessons — the sound system, the noun-class families, the verb slot machine, the Swahili clock, and concord tier by tier. Readable in all six languages, and free to read here.
- Drills
- Three, shaped to Swahili rather than borrowed: the verb train built slot by slot, plurals by noun class, and dictation.
- Audio
- Text-to-speech on every word and every example sentence, in a neural standard Kiswahili voice. Synthesis, not a recording of a speaker.
- Fibonacci SRS
- Rate each card 0–5. The better you know a word, the longer before it returns.
- Boss fights
- No cluster is cleared until its hardest words are answered. Beat it and its cards leave your daily deck for good.
Three packs, three thousand words
Core is out. The two that follow are written and are not on sale yet; neither carries a date until it is.
The foundation: greetings and the family through the town, work and health to government and the news.
On SteamThe working vocabulary: money and the bank, the contract, the ministry, elections, the court, the press, the hospital.
Written, not yet outWhere derivation opens up — one root becomes six verbs — and the vocabulary follows it into public life and register.
Written, not yet outEach pack is 1,000 words and five tiers, and each takes the one before it as read. The end of Pareto 1 is the hump: not finished, but the language has stopped being a wall.
Before you buy
Do I need the base game?
Yes. Swahili Core is DLC for FlashBoss, so you need the base game as well. Everything else — the lessons, the audio, the drills, the boss fights — is inside the pack. On Windows 10 you also need Windows Terminal, a free download from the Microsoft Store.
Can I study it in my own language?
Fully. Every card carries its translation, its example translation and its study notes in German, Japanese, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Spanish as well as English, with no gaps, and all 20 reference lessons carry the same six. The game's own interface speaks them too.
Which Swahili is this?
Standard Kiswahili — the one taught in schools and used by the press across East Africa, based on the Zanzibar dialect. The voice is a neural standard Kiswahili voice.
Can I see the words before I buy?
All of them. The complete word list and all twenty reference lessons are on this site — free, printable, no account. There is also a playable boss fight.
Is there a British or American spelling layer?
That layer covers the English packs. Swahili's English is the translation side of the card, and the pack ships one edition of it.
Start with Habari?
Two machines and a thousand words. The rest of Swahili agrees with them.
Swahili Core on Steam →