Kinyarwanda is spoken by about 16 million people. Kinyarwanda and Rundi are one continuum and their speakers understand each other.
On our measured language map, its closest relatives are Rundi, Luganda and Swahili. 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 Kinyarwanda 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, 1,383 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 984 hours of study. Read how it works.
Most apps only teach Kinyarwanda 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:
Speaker figures follow Ethnologue and national censuses, rounded. The difficulty estimate is calibrated against U.S. Foreign Service Institute data.