Learn Chichewa Through Topics You Actually Care About

LingoBear creates short Chichewa passages on topics you choose. Tap any word for an instant English translation and build your vocabulary as you read. Bantu language, official language of Malawi (where it is called Chinyanja), Latin script, 17 noun classes, ~14M speakers across southern Africa.

Tap any word for instant translation

Every word in your Chichewa reading passage is clickable. Get English translations and grammar help while you parse the Bantu noun-class system.

Read about topics you choose

Type any topic and LingoBear generates a fresh Chichewa reading passage — from Lake Malawi to chitenje fashion.

What is Chichewa and where is it spoken?

Chichewa (also called Chinyanja or just Nyanja) is a Bantu language of the Niger-Congo family, with around 14 million speakers in Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. It is the national language of Malawi alongside English. The 'chi-' prefix is the language class marker, while 'Chewa' is the ethnic group.

What grammar features does Chichewa have?

Like most Bantu languages, Chichewa uses noun classes (around 17 paired singular/plural classes) that trigger agreement on verbs, adjectives and demonstratives. Verbs are agglutinative — a single verb can carry subject, object, tense, aspect and mood markers. LingoBear lets you see these patterns in real reading material.