Sinhala is spoken by about 20 million people.
On our measured language map, its closest relatives are Fuzhounese (Eastern Min Chinese), Kannada and Marathi. If you speak one of those, much of the vocabulary will feel familiar from day one.
Structurally, objects usually come before their verbs; it is written in the Sinhala script, and the course teaches the writing system letter by letter with pronunciation shown while you learn.
Every lesson is built from 2,000 real Sinhala 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 1,547 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.