00:00:00:00

You went quiet at the last owambe.

everyone else answered back in Yorùbá.

Standard Yorùbá · Lesson 1 · 20 exchanges

Get the tone wrong.
Get a new word.

Yorùbá packs meaning into pitch, not just sound. Naijatongue listens to your voice note, shows you exactly where your pitch broke from the word, and talks back — until you’re actually understood. Igbo and Hausa are next.

Send a voice noteSee tone correction work

Most of us can hear it. Few of us can say it back.

A lot of us grew up around Yorùbá — parents, grandparents, an aunty at every gathering — and never learned to speak it back. We went quiet, answered in English, or let a cousin translate. That’s not a mild inconvenience. It’s a real loss, and it feels like one.

Flashcard apps teach words. They don’t teach the pitch that makes those words land — and Yorùbá is tonal, so the wrong pitch isn’t a bad accent, it’s a different word. That’s the one thing every existing option skips, and the one thing Naijatongue is built around.

no wàhálà — just tone, fixed.

Tone isn’t a detail. It’s the word.

One consonant-vowel skeleton, four completely different words — distinguished only by pitch. This is what every lesson quietly skips, and what Naijatongue corrects on every voice note.

SAME SOUND · DIFFERENT WORD

Pitch contour for the Yorùbá word Ọwọ́, meaning handA two-syllable pitch line rising or falling between low, mid, and high, tracing the tone pattern M–H.HML

Ọwọ́

“hand”

M–H tone

Say it flat — the dashed line — and it isn’t a soft version of this word. It’s a different one.

Example lesson exchange, Standard Yorùbá — shown here as a worked example, not a live reply.

One voice note in. One correction back.

  1. 00:01

    You send a voice note

    In Yorùbá, on WhatsApp — wherever you already talk to people. No app to install.

  2. 00:02

    We score what you said

    Pronunciation and pitch, checked against the reference word — not just whether you said the right letters.

  3. 00:03

    You see exactly where it broke

    Syllable by syllable, which part of the pitch went wrong and what it accidentally said instead.

  4. 00:04

    We reply back — in Yorùbá

    A real spoken reply, pitched to where you actually are, not a generic next flashcard.

  5. 00:05

    The track scaffolds up

    Twenty exchanges in Lesson 1, each slightly harder than the last.

Lesson 1 · Side A

Standard Yorùbá

20 exchanges

  1. 01Greeting someone older than you
  2. 02Greeting someone your age
  3. 03Introducing your name
  4. 04Asking someone's name
  5. 05Saying where you're from
  6. 06Asking ‘how are you’ — and meaning it
  7. 07Answering ‘how are you’
  8. 08Saying please and thank you
  9. 09Asking for something politely
  10. 10Counting one to ten
  11. 11Asking ‘how much’
  12. 12Naming your family — mother, father, siblings
  13. 13Saying yes and no the polite way
  14. 14Asking someone to repeat themselves
  15. 15Describing your day
  16. 16Asking what time it is
  17. 17Making a plan to meet
  18. 18Apologizing
  19. 19Saying goodbye to an elder
  20. 20Ending the call — and meaning ‘see you again’

Free at home. Paid abroad.

Language shouldn’t be gatekept by price in Nigeria. Everywhere else, it’s the thing you’d pay for the moment you realized what it cost you not to have it.

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Full access to Lesson 1, tone correction included. No card, no trial clock.

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  • — Every lesson track, as they ship
  • — Full tone correction on every voice note
  • — Built for kids and adults learning from abroad
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