Kanuri is spoken by about 9 million people. Central and Manga Kanuri together; estimates range from 7.6 to 9.6 million and predate the displacement in the Lake Chad basin.
On our measured language map, its closest relatives are Nuer, Latin and Aymara. If you speak one of those, much of the vocabulary will feel familiar from day one.
Structurally, objects usually come before their verbs; words are built from many smaller pieces, which our course teaches piece by piece.
Every lesson is built from 2,000 real Kanuri 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, 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 1,357 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.