Krio is spoken by about 8 million people, most of whom learned it as a second language. Eight second-language speakers for every native one, the widest ratio here: Krio is how nearly all of Sierra Leone talks to the rest of it.
On our measured language map, its closest relatives are Jamaican Patois, English 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.
Every lesson is built from 2,000 real Krio 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, 1,478 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 591 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.