Audio on every line
Sauti kila mstari
Every line is read aloud and the words are highlighted as you hear them, so the sound arrives with the word instead of after it.
Live · kiswanglish.com
Learn English by reading.
Jifunze Kiingereza kwa kusoma
Kiswanglish teaches English to Swahili speakers the way people actually acquire a language: by reading a lot of it, at a level just past comfortable, with help close enough to hand that you never have to stop.
Kila somo lina · Every lesson includes
Four things, on every passage
The same support on every story, so nothing about the interface ever becomes the hard part.
Translations in reach
Tafsiri karibu
Meaning is one tap away. The dictionary detour is what kills extensive reading, so it is designed out.
Vocabulary flashcards
Kadi za msamiati
Words met in a story move into a review deck and come back on a spacing schedule, just before you would forget them.
Comprehension checks
Maswali ya ufahamu
Quizzes mix audio, text and image, so a word is tested the way it will actually be met.
The method
Read slightly past your level, on purpose
Text far above your level is noise. Text at your level is comfortable and inert. Everything is built around holding you in the narrow band between.
Start at a sentence, end at a paragraph
Passages are graded so each step is small. You are always reading slightly past your level, which is the only place acquisition actually happens.
Volume over drilling
You learn English mostly by understanding English, not by studying rules about it. The job of the product is to keep you reading.
Reading and review, kept separate
Masomo for the stories, Marudio for the words. Reading gives rich but fragile first contact; spaced review makes it stay.
Soma kwa makini. Hakuna misururu wala pointi — hadithi tu.
Read carefully. No streaks, no points — just stories.
Streaks are very good at getting an app opened and much less good at getting anyone to read. Someone protecting a long streak does the two-minute lesson that preserves it rather than the twenty-minute read that would move them forward, and when the streak finally breaks a lot of people stop altogether. Kiswanglish gives up the retention tricks and bets on the stories instead.
Built for Swahili speakers
The interface is in your language
Navigation runs in Swahili — Nyumbani, Masomo, Marudio, Changia — while the content you are learning is English. A beginner should not have to decode the app before decoding the story.
- Section headings run in parallel: Ngazi za usomaji · Reading levels
- The difficulty lives in the passage, and nowhere else
- Built for Swahili speakers specifically, not translated at them
Pricing
Free, and priced in shillings
The paid tier removes advertising rather than gating lessons. Someone who cannot pay anything still gets the entire method.
Free
- All stories, with audio on every line
- Translations and vocabulary flashcards
- Comprehension quizzes and progress tracking
- A free account to keep your progress
TZS 20,000/mwaka
- Everything in the free tier
- Advertising removed
- Priced in shillings, not dollars
Bidhaa dada · Sister product
The same engine, pointed the other way
Swahilio teaches Swahili to English speakers with identical pedagogy. Building the reverse course is the strongest test that this is a method and not a lucky fit for one language pair.
Start reading today
It is live, it is free, and you do not need an account to look around.