Speak the Sinhala people actually use.

Yes, the first two lessons are completely free forever — no credit card, no signup, no email required. Just open the app and start learning. At Learn Sinhala, we believe you should try before you buy. For the full eleven-lesson course, we're planning a very small subscription, aiming to keep it cheaper than a coffee per month. There are no hidden fees, no surprise charges, and no lock-in. You can access the free lessons as many times as you want, on any device, offline or online.

No. At Learn Sinhala, we teach spoken Sinhala using a Latin transliteration system with long-vowel marks (ā, ī, ū, ē, ō) — the same system you'd find in a dictionary. The Sinhala script appears beside every word so you naturally start recognising characters, but you are never tested on writing it. This spoken-first approach means you can start having real conversations within minutes, not months. It's the method we wish existed when we were kids.

We teach modern spoken Colombo Sinhala — the half-English, casual register that people under 40 use every day in Sri Lanka's capital and beyond. This is not formal literary Sinhala, and it's not a remote village dialect. It's the language your cousins text you in: dropped consonants, English nouns dropped mid-sentence, and the famous "eka" trick. At Learn Sinhala, we focus on the Sinhala people actually speak in 2026, not the Sinhala from 1996 textbooks.

Absolutely. Learn Sinhala is built as a Progressive Web App (PWA), which means once you open it in your browser, all lessons, audio, and your progress are stored locally on your device. You can add it to your home screen with one tap and it runs like a standalone app — no app store needed. This makes it perfect for planes, tuk-tuks, and that one stretch of road near Ella with no signal. At Learn Sinhala, we believe learning shouldn't stop when your connection does.

Because Duolingo does not teach Sinhala, and the apps that do teach it like it's 1996 — full alphabet drills, stiff textbook sentences, no spoken audio, and no recognition of how modern Sinhala actually works. At Learn Sinhala, we skip the alphabet gatekeeping and teach the casual, dropped-consonant, half-English Sinhala you'll hear on the bus and in your ammā's kitchen. This is the crash course we wish existed when we were kids.

Learn Sinhala was built by a Sri Lankan developer who was tired of textbook apps that teach a language nobody actually speaks. It is a passion project, not a venture-backed startup — which means it ships when it's genuinely good, not when a quarterly roadmap demands it. The curriculum is based on real conversations with family, friends, and cousins in Colombo, and the "eka trick" methodology came from observing how actual Sri Lankans code-switch between English and Sinhala every single day.