Learn Amharic
Amharic is written in a script almost nobody outside Ethiopia and Eritrea can read, and that is the whole of the first hurdle — the language underneath it is regular. The fidel is a syllabary: each base shape carries a vowel, and six small systematic modifications to the shape change which vowel it carries. iLexiBox starts there, so the script stops being a wall on the first day.
Start at the fidel
The Amharic on-ramp is written by hand, not generated, and it is 199 cards long. Every card is spoken in a recorded Amharic voice, and what you get right is scheduled for review rather than shown again at random. This is the shorter, starter size of on-ramp; most languages here have about 480 cards.
- 33base characters
- 10digits
- 16pronunciation rules
- 100core words
- 20everyday phrases
- 20sentences
Three of the pronunciation cards, exactly as the on-ramp teaches them:
- ሀ — first order — the plain base shape, with a short “ä” like the a in “sofa”ሀገር — country
- ሁ — second order — a small stroke hangs off the right side and adds “u”ሁለት — two
- ሂ — third order — the stroke drops to the foot and adds “i”ሂሳብ — bill / arithmetic
Your first Amharic phrases
The first phrase and sentence cards of the on-ramp, each spoken in a recorded voice:
- እንደምን አለህ? in-dem-in AL-eh — how are you? (to a man)
- እንደምን አለሽ? in-dem-in A-lesh — how are you? (to a woman)
- እንደምን አሉ? in-dem-in A-lu — how are you? (polite, or to more than one person)
- እኔ ተማሪ ነኝ። i-NE te-ma-RI neny — I am a student.
- ስሜ ማርታ ነው። si-ME MAR-ta new — My name is Marta.
Then material that does not run out
Above the on-ramp sit the practice path (A1 to C2), Make a text at your level and the album: more than 2,700 photographs, each captioned and spoken in Amharic. Amharic has practice and tools, not lessons — the only course on iLexiBox is the full English course (how each part works).
What Amharic actually costs a beginner
The cost is the size of the chart rather than its difficulty: thirty-three base characters times seven orders is a lot of shapes, and no cleverness reduces the number. What makes it learnable is that the modification is consistent — the same stroke hanging off the right side adds u whichever base it hangs from — so the on-ramp teaches the pattern on real words instead of drilling the grid. Beyond the script, what takes practice is the ejectives, made with the throat closed and released with a pop, which have no English equivalent and are on the audio for that reason.
The full English course, A1–C1 →