Chichewa is spoken by about 20 million people. The commonly cited current figure; the most-quoted published one dates from 2007 and is far lower.
On our measured language map, its closest relatives are Tumbuka, Bemba and Shona. If you speak one of those, much of the vocabulary will feel familiar from day one.
Structurally, words are built from many smaller pieces, which our course teaches piece by piece.
Every lesson is built from 2,000 real Chichewa 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, 1,504 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 1,331 hours of study. Read how it works.
Speaker figures follow Ethnologue and national censuses, rounded. The difficulty estimate is calibrated against U.S. Foreign Service Institute data.