About LearnPatois

What LearnPatois is

LearnPatois teaches Jamaican Patois (Jamaican Creole) and nothing else. It is not a language platform with Patois added to a list — the curriculum, the spelling conventions, the voices, the tone and the mascot are all specific to this one language.

You learn along a hand-authored path of Tracks, Units and Lessons. Every 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. Underneath, every Item you meet carries its own memory state, so the app knows when to bring it back.

Who it is for

First, for heritage learners in the diaspora — roughly three million people, of whom over a million were born in Jamaica. If you grew up hearing Patois at home and understand far more than you can say, this app was designed around exactly that gap.

It also works from zero. Absolute beginners, travellers and people who arrived through the music all learn the same way; the Track you pick at the start is what changes.

How it teaches

• Spelling you will actually see. Phrases are shown in the English-based spelling people use every day. The scholarly Cassidy/JLU form is stored on every Item underneath as the pronunciation ground truth, so nothing is guessed at.
• One variety taught, several accepted. Lessons teach the middle of the Patois continuum. Broader and more anglicised realisations of the same phrase are accepted too — because in a continuum, "wrong" is very often just "further along it".
• Human voices. Native recordings are the primary audio. Where a recording has not landed yet, synthetic audio stands in and is marked as such, and it is replaced without you losing any progress.
• Speaking feedback in words, not numbers. Say a phrase and the app tells you which syllables landed. It never puts a number out of ten on your accent, because no honest system could.
• Review timed to forgetting. Spaced repetition sits under the authored path, so the app schedules a word's return rather than waiting for you to fail it.

Who writes and reviews this

Everything you read here — the Lessons, the phrase lists and the Guides — is written by hand, reviewed by a fluent Patois speaker, and stored in version control with the review attached to it. There is no scraped dictionary underneath any of it and no bulk-generated content anywhere on this site.

Every piece of content sits on a three-rung ladder, and the rung is a field rather than a promise:

• Draft. Written, not yet attested. A draft never appears on the public site and is never listed in the sitemap — the address returns a 404 rather than a page that says "coming soon".
• Native reviewed. A fluent speaker has read it and signed off on the language: the spellings, the phrases and anything the page says about how Patois is used. This is the lowest rung at which anything is published.
• Published. Reviewed, edited and live.

The rule that matters is the one in the middle: nothing publishes without a fluent-speaker attestation. Writing can be assisted; publication cannot. A public page is more exposed than a Lesson, not less — a learner meets a Lesson having chosen to, whereas a page like this one turns up in a search result in front of somebody who speaks Patois better than we do.

Where a claim comes from a source, it is a source we are allowed to use — original authoring by speakers, or openly licensed grammatical description. Copyrighted dictionaries and phrase sites are consulted to check that a form exists and are never copied from. Sources requiring attribution get it.

The orthography we follow

Patois is spoken far more than it is written, and no single spelling system is in general public use. That leaves anyone teaching it with a genuine problem, and we solve it by keeping two written forms of every phrase rather than picking one and pretending the question is settled.

The form you see is the English-based popular spelling — the way a fluent Jamaican would write to a friend, the way lyrics and captions are written. It is the form you will actually meet outside this app, and it is readable on sight to anyone who reads English.

Stored underneath every phrase is its Cassidy/JLU form. That is the phonemic writing system devised by the linguist Frederic Cassidy and later codified by the Jamaican Language Unit at the University of the West Indies, Mona, and published as Writing Jamaican the Jamaican Way. One letter means one sound, always, which is exactly why it is the pronunciation reference: the popular spelling of a word can be read two ways, and the Cassidy form of it cannot.

So the same phrase is written twice, on purpose: Likkle more(likl muor)— see you later. The first form is the one you read and the one a Lesson shows you. The second is what it sounds like, and it is what the speaking feedback aligns your voice against.

We follow that published writing system. We are not affiliated with the Jamaican Language Unit or with the University of the West Indies, and nothing here is endorsed by either — we cite their work because it is the best description of the language there is.

About Doc

Doc is a doctor bird — the red-billed streamertail, Jamaica's national bird. He turns up to explain a grammar point, to celebrate a Streak, and to sit with you when a Session goes badly. He is the only mascot this app has ever had.

What it deliberately is not

Some things are missing on purpose, so you are not left wondering:

• No public chat and no direct messages.
• No user-uploaded photos or media of any kind. Avatars come from a curated set.
• No real-money purchases. The whole economy is virtual and earned by playing.
• No AI tutor chat, and no video lectures.
• Lessons need a connection — there is no offline play yet.
• The interface is in English. The thing being taught is Patois.