Learn Jamaican Patois online

free interactive course2,000 real sentences works on your phonevery easy · ~194 hrs

Jamaican Patois is spoken by about 4 million people. Jamaica plus the diaspora. English-lexified, so the boundary with Jamaican English is a continuum rather than a line.

On our measured language map, its closest relatives are English, Krio and Tok Pisin. If you speak one of those, much of the vocabulary will feel familiar from day one.

Structurally, verbs usually come before their objects.

one sentence from the course
split into its working pieces by the course itself: tap any piece to light up what it pairs with, and tap the speaker to hear it. Every one of the 2,000 sentences works like this.
4 millionspeakers
2,000real sentences
1,927patterns discovered
~194hours from english
Try a Jamaican Patois lesson now, free, no signup or create a free account

Real Jamaican Patois sentences from the course

Join wi.
Join us.
Git up!
Wake up!
Paadn mi.
Forgive me.
Mi happy.
I am happy.
Mi can swim.
I can swim.

How the course works

Every lesson is built from 2,000 real Jamaican Patois 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, 1,927 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 194 hours of study. Read how it works.

Related languages you can also learn

KrioTok PisinOld EnglishAfrikaansDutchCatalanOccitanNorwegian

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