I made a free webapp so that people with little to no German background can learn Bärndütsch (and Swiss German)

Hi there

Sooo I’m from Bern (Bernese Oberland) and I frequently talk to people who moved here from abroad, and a lot of them struggle with Bärndütsch (or Swiss German in general). They are often in the process of learning German, but they still feel excluded from everyday conversations; and when they try to learn Swiss German, the response they often get is “Learn German first, and then Swiss German will come”. I generally agree with that, but that leaves people excluded from everyday conversations frequently and makes integration here harder for them. So I tried to make a webapp where you can learn Bärndütsch just from English:

www.langapp.ch

The whole thing is still a work in progress, but so far I made 36 lessons and I plan to keep adding more of them whenever I have time :slight_smile: All of it is completely free and I intend to keep it that way (if you’d like to support, you can buy me a coffee on there, but that is absolutely voluntary and not expected) :slight_smile:

It’s a pretty simple app with a few lesson types, that works a bit like Busuu or Duolingo. You can use it as a guest by clicking the button below the login without an account! The account is just there for tracking progress and giving recommendations for which lessons to repeat, as well as just getting overall repetition lessons.

A few disclaimers: There are no official writing or vocabulary conventions, so this is based on how I and my friends speak; some old-school Bern folks might disagree with some of the things in there haha. Also I’m no language teacher, I try to explain everything in as much detail and clearly as possible, but I might still make mistakes or not organize and structure it as clearly. Please be lenient with me there!

If you find any bugs, errors or have comments, please let me know! Thanks :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Sign in with Google? Really?

this, learning Swiss German is as useful as learning Elbonian, you can turn up anywhere in Swiss German speaking part speak loudly Elbonian insisting it’s your Swiss German from generations and complain about the local variant :rofl:

PS. @gewoi since you don’t know how to write it, how about writing it in a standard way https://www.ipachart.com/ Interestingly, toIPA.org have even speach-to-text tool, so give it a try :wink: (you can find many other german to ipa free conversion sites, just ask ai)