Wah gwaan?
Say it: wa gwaan
What's happening?
Word for word: what going-on
28 guides to the language, written and native-reviewed
The first real course in Jamaican Patois.
Not a phrasebook and not a dictionary — a hand-authored curriculum with native audio, speaking practice that listens, and reviews timed to your memory. Built for the diaspora first — and for absolute beginners, travellers and anyone who found Patois through the music too.
Free to start. No card, no account required.
- Tracks
- 4
- Guides
- 28
- Human audio: never text-to-speech
- Real spelling system: not guesswork
- Native-speaker reviewed: before anything publishes
- Free to start: no card, no account
- Speaking that listens: feedback, not a score out of ten
- Reviews timed to your memory: spaced repetition, every Item
- Hand-authored path: you always know what's next
- Every accent accepted: basilect to acrolect, all of it passes
- Hearts: your mistake budget, not a game over
- Energy: refills on its own as the day goes on
- Gems: earned by playing, never bought
- Streak: every day you meet your goal
- Weekly League: a cohort of about thirty
- Installable PWA: add it to your home screen
- One language, done right: not a phrasebook
Everything you need to actually speak it
Every part of the app — the curriculum, the spelling, the voice, the mascot — is built for one language instead of bent to fit it.
A real curriculum, not a phrasebook
Hand-authored Tracks, each one an ordering of Units and Lessons over a single shared pool of Items. You always know what comes next.
Native audio first
Human recordings by Jamaican speakers are the primary audio. Nothing about Patois pronunciation is guessed at by a text-to-speech engine.
Speaking that actually listens
Say the phrase and get useful feedback on which syllables landed — in plain language, never as a number out of ten.
Reviews timed to your memory
Every Item carries its own memory state, so the app brings a word back the day before you would have lost it.
How it works
Pick a Track
Roots, From Zero, Yaad Trip or Riddim. Each is a different route through the same language, so you can start where you actually are.
Play a Lesson
A Session is a handful of Exercises. Hearts are your mistake budget; Energy is what it costs to start.
Keep the Streak
Hit your daily goal to earn XP, climb your weekly League, finish Quests and open the daily chest on the Treasure hunt.
A phrase list teaches you phrases. This teaches you the language.
Almost everything written about Patois online is a lookup table. A dictionary tells you what a word means; it does not get you to the point of saying it to somebody who will answer.
Phrasebooks and dictionaries
What is already out there
Spelling
One spelling per site, and no two sites agree
Review
You remember to come back, or you do not
What counts as right
One answer, usually the most anglicised one
Cost
Free, and worth it
LearnPatois
What this is instead
Spelling
The spelling people actually write, with Cassidy/JLU underneath
Review
Each Item returns the day before you would have lost it
What counts as right
Basilect and acrolect both pass — the deep end and the English-leaning end of the continuum
Cost
Free, with no card and no real-money purchase anywhere
The game part, in six words
Six things to keep track of, and no more than six. Each one has exactly one job.
- Hearts
- Your mistake budget inside a Lesson. They come back on their own.
- Energy
- What it costs to start a Session. It refills as the day goes on.
- Gems
- The one currency. Earned by playing, spent in the Shop.
- XP
- Progression, and the only thing a League ranks you on.
- Streak
- Consecutive days you met your daily goal.
- League
- A weekly cohort of about thirty learners. Everyone starts level.
4 Days streak
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday completed. Sunday, Monday and Tuesday remaining. Today is Saturday.
Today’s goal
Casual is 20 XP a day, intense is 200. You pick, and you can change it.
The League ladder
- Yaad
- Likkle More
- Irie
- Bran New
- Tallawah
- Champion
- Legend
Pick your Track
Four routes through one language, chosen by where you are starting from rather than by how much you are willing to pay. You choose in the first minute, and you can change your mind later without losing anything.
Roots
Everyday Patois for heritage learners
Start from the greetings, family and grammar that anchor a real conversation. Practise here first, low-stakes, before you try it out loud with the people who'll actually hear it.
From Zero
No Patois yet? Start here.
A gentle on-ramp for an absolute beginner: concrete words you can point at — food, money — before any grammar arrives.
Yaad Trip
Patois for a trip to Jamaica
The practical phrases a visitor actually needs: getting around, ordering, and being polite to somebody who will answer you back.
Riddim
Learn Patois through music
For the learner who found Patois through dancehall and reggae. Start with the words you already half-know from the songs.
All four draw on the same pool of Items, so a word you learn in one is a word you already know in another. A Track decides the order you meet them in — it is a starting point, not a different syllabus.
Free. Here’s exactly what that means.
“Free” is easy to say and easy to qualify away afterwards. So here is the whole of it, in five statements you can hold us to.
None of it is a countdown to a paywall, and none of it is a trial that quietly switches the app off.
No card, at any point
There is no checkout in the app, so there is nowhere to put one. You will not be asked at the start, at the end of a Lesson, or on the way out.
No account needed to start
Press start and you are in a Lesson. Guest mode is a real signed-in state, not a preview with the good parts removed.
Your progress comes with you
Make an account later from the same browser and your Track, your Streak, your XP, your Gems and every Item's review schedule move across.
Gems are earned, and only earned
Lessons, chests, Quests, milestones and the League podium pay them. They have no cash value and there is no way to buy them.
No real-money purchase anywhere
Not for Hearts, not for Energy, not for an avatar. The whole economy runs on what you earn by playing.
There is more than one way to say it, and we accept them.
Patois is a continuum, not a fixed standard. LearnPatois teaches the middle of that range by default, and grades your answer against the whole lattice — a broader or a more anglicised version of the same phrase both pass. Spelling is shown the way people actually write it, with the scholarly Cassidy/JLU form kept underneath as the pronunciation ground truth.
“I don’t eat it”, three ways — all three pass
- Mi nuh nyam itDeeper
- Mi doh eat itMiddle
- Mi don't eat itLighter
Basilect to acrolect. All three pass; the middle is what we teach.
Every Exercise carries a one-tap report if we got it wrong. We read them.
Twelve Patois phrases to start with
These twelve carry an ordinary Jamaican day between them, and none of them needs grammar you have not met yet.
Two spellings are given for each. The first is the way people actually write Patois to one another — in a message, in a caption, in a song title. The second is Cassidy/JLU, a phonemic writing system in which one letter always makes one sound. You read the first; the second is what tells you, without ambiguity, how the phrase is pronounced.
Mi deh yah
Say it: mi de ya
I'm here — I'm fine
Word for word: I there here
Everyting criss
Say it: evriting kris
Everything's good
Weh yuh deh pon?
Say it: we yu de pan
What are you up to?
Word for word: where you there on
Mi soon come
Say it: mi suun kom
I'll be back shortly
Mi haffi guh
Say it: mi afi guo
I have to go
Likkle more
Say it: likl muor
See you later
Word for word: little more
Walk gud
Say it: waak gud
Take care
Word for word: walk good
Big up yuhself
Say it: big op yuself
Well done — respect to you
Nuff respec
Say it: nof rispek
Much respect
Dem nuh know
Say it: dem no nuo
They don't know
Di pickney dem
Say it: di pikni dem
The children
Word for word: the child them
One warning about Mi soon come(mi suun kom): it does not mean immediately. It means the speaker intends to come back, on a timescale nobody has committed to. Patois has a lot of these — phrases that translate word for word and then mean something else entirely, which is the part a phrase list on its own cannot teach you.
The last card shows the plural in action. dem after a noun does the work English does with an -s, and it is one of the first structures that stops Patois looking like English with the spelling changed. Both of its spellings are the same, which is commoner than the more alarming cards above suggest.
More of them, grouped by the situation you would use them in, are on our Jamaican Patois phrases page.
Meet Doc, the doctor bird
Doc is a red-billed streamertail — the hummingbird that lives nowhere on earth but Jamaica, and the island’s national bird. Jamaicans call it the doctor bird, which is where he gets his name.
He turns up when a Lesson lands, when an answer needs explaining, and when a Streak survives a bad week — in one of twenty-seven poses, drawn just for LearnPatois.
What is Jamaican Patois?
Where it came from, who speaks it, and why it sounds half-familiar the first time you hear it.
Jamaican Patois — Jamaican Creole in the linguistic literature, Patwa to plenty of the people who speak it — is the everyday language of Jamaica. Around three million people speak it on the island, and several million more across the diaspora in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.
It is an English-lexifier creole. Most of its words come from English, which is why a first-time listener catches perhaps a third of a conversation and then loses the rest. The grammar carrying those words is not English grammar. It formed through contact between English and West African languages during the eighteenth century, and it kept structure from both.
That combination is what makes Patois feel familiar and impenetrable at the same time.
You recognise the words. You do not recognise how tense, plurality and negation are being marked, because they are marked in a different way — with separate words rather than with endings.
English is Jamaica’s official language, used in law, government and schooling. Patois is the language of home, of music, of the street and of most actual conversation: spoken by nearly everyone, written down far less often, and for most of its history taught to nobody.
Is Jamaican Patois hard to learn?
The vocabulary and the grammar have opposite answers, and only one of them is the work.
Honestly: the vocabulary is approachable and the grammar is not. Those are two different halves of the same question and they have opposite answers.
If you already speak English you begin with most of the words. wata, meaning water, likkle(likl), meaning little and pickney(pikni), meaning child — take a few seconds each. Reading a phrase list, you will feel like you are doing well, and for that hour you are.
The grammar is where the language actually lives. Tense is marked with separate words rather than with endings — Mi go(mi guo), Mi did go(mi did guo), Mi a go(mi a guo) — and plurality, negation, questions and emphasis are each built their own way. None of it is complicated. It is difficult in a different sense: your English instincts will be confidently wrong, and the work is noticing that before you have said the sentence.
Which is also the good part. Learning Patois grammar is learning a different way of organising the same ideas, and it is a genuinely interesting one — not a list of exceptions to English.
We write about the grammar and the vocabulary at length elsewhere on the site. Start with how to speak Jamaican Patois for the grammar in order, the Jamaican Patois phrases list for things to say, Jamaican Patois words for vocabulary with its pronunciation, or Jamaican Patois and English for what is genuinely different between the two. Everything else we have written is indexed in the Guides.
How LearnPatois teaches Patois
A hand-authored curriculum, native audio, speaking that listens, and reviews timed to your memory.
Recordings, not synthesis. Speaking checked against them, not scored. Every word timed to come back before you forget it.
LearnPatois is a hand-authored curriculum. You pick a Track — a route through the language chosen for where you are starting from — and work along an ordered path of Units and Lessons. Each Lesson is a short Session of Exercises: listen and choose, match a pair, build the phrase from a word bank, fill the gap, say it out loud.
Three things separate it from a phrase deck. Recordings by Jamaican speakers are the primary audio, so pronunciation is never guessed at by a synthetic voice. Speaking Exercises align what you said against the sounds of the phrase and report which syllables landed — in words, never as a score. And every Item you meet carries its own memory state, so the app brings a word back the day before you would have lost it.
Frequently asked questions
Eight things people ask before they start. Open one and the last one closes, so the list stays a list.
Is Jamaican Patois a language, or a dialect of English?
A language. It is an English-lexifier creole: most of its vocabulary came from English, but its grammar — how tense, plurality and negation are marked — follows rules English does not have. Shared vocabulary is not shared grammar.
Is LearnPatois free?
Yes. You can learn without paying and without a card. There are no real-money purchases anywhere in the app: Gems are earned by playing and have no cash value. You can start as a guest without making an account at all.
How long does it take to learn Jamaican Patois?
Longer than a weekend, and less time than a language whose vocabulary you do not already half-know. An English speaker doing a short session most days can hold a simple exchange within a few weeks. Following fast, unfamiliar speech takes considerably longer, and that is listening practice rather than study.
Do I need to know any Patois already?
No. Tracks start from zero. LearnPatois was designed first for heritage learners — people who grew up hearing Patois, understand far more than they can say, and want to close that gap — but absolute beginners, travellers and people who arrived through the music all begin the same way.
Which kind of Patois do you teach?
The middle of the range: roughly what a Kingston speaker would use with somebody they have just met. Patois runs from deep creole to something very close to English, and we start in the middle because it is the most useful place to start. Both ends are accepted when you answer.
Why is Patois spelled differently everywhere I look?
Because it is spoken far more than it is written, and no single spelling is in general public use. We show phrases the way people actually write them, and store the Cassidy/JLU form underneath as the pronunciation reference — the same phonemic spelling used on the phrase cards above.
Can I practise speaking, or is it only reading?
You can speak. Say the phrase into your microphone and the app aligns what you said against the sounds of the target, then tells you which syllables landed — in plain words, never as a score or a percentage.
Do I need an account to start?
Not to start. Play as a guest and your progress is kept — Track, Streak, XP, Gems and every Item's review schedule all move across the moment you make an account from the same browser.
Wah gwaan? Start your first Lesson today.
It takes about five minutes, and you can play as a guest — your progress moves across with you if you make an account later.