Learn Basque online

free interactive course2,000 real sentences works on your phoneHard for an English speaker, ~1,431 hrs

Basque is spoken by about 810,000 people. Fluent bilinguals, of whom nearly half learned it at school rather than at home. Monolinguals are effectively extinct.

On our measured language map, its closest relatives are Mongolian, Chechen and Chuvash. If you speak one of those, much of the vocabulary will feel familiar from day one.

Structurally, objects come before their verbs, where English puts them after.

one sentence from the course
BasqueHoridabereautoa
EnglishThatishercar
split into its working pieces by the course itself, and paired with the English underneath. Tap a piece to light up what it pairs with. Every one of the 2,000 sentences works like this.
810,000speakers
2,000real sentences
1,490patterns discovered
~1,431hours from English
Try a Basque lesson now, free, no signup or create a free account

Real Basque sentences from the course

Batu zaitez gurekin.
Join us.
Esnatu!
Wake up!
Barkatu.
Forgive me.
Zoriontsu naiz.
I am happy.
Igeri egin dezaket.
I can swim.

How the course works

Every lesson is built from 2,000 real Basque sentences, aligned with their translations word by word and piece by piece, so you always see how the sentence actually works instead of memorizing flashcards. The grammar is discovered from the sentences themselves, 1,490 patterns so far, and a spaced-repetition quiz teaches it in the order that unlocks the most of the language first. Our measured estimate for reaching conversational level from English is about 1,431 hours of study. Read how it works.

Learn Basque from your own language

Most apps only teach Basque through English, if they teach it at all. These starting languages already have a built course, and any other published language can be paired on request:

EnglishBretonCatalanDutchGermanHungarianIndonesianItalianJapanesePolishPortuguese (Brazil)Portuguese (Portugal)RussianSpanish

Related languages you can also learn

MongolianChechenChuvashMyanmar (Burmese)Meiteilon (Manipuri)TuvanTatarTulu

Speaker figures follow Ethnologue and national censuses, rounded. The difficulty estimate is calibrated against U.S. Foreign Service Institute data.