Kituba is spoken by about 8 million people, most of whom learned it as a second language. The least certain figure on this page: published counts for this Kongo-based creole disagree by an order of magnitude.
On our measured language map, its closest relatives are Kikongo, Lingala and Fuzhounese (Eastern Min Chinese). If you speak one of those, much of the vocabulary will feel familiar from day one.
Structurally, verbs usually come before their objects.
Every lesson is built from 2,000 real Kituba 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 996 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.