Learn Pashto Through Topics You Actually Care About

LingoBear creates short Pashto passages on topics you choose. Tap any word for an instant English translation and build your vocabulary as you read. Eastern Iranian language, modified Perso-Arabic script with 44 letters including retroflexes (ټ, ډ, ړ, ڼ), split ergativity, ~60M speakers in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Tap any word for instant translation

Every word in your Pashto reading passage is clickable. Get English translations and grammar help as you read the right-to-left Pashto script.

Read about topics you choose

Type any topic and LingoBear generates a fresh Pashto reading passage — from Khattak dances to news from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

What is Pashto and where is it spoken?

Pashto (پښتو) is an Eastern Iranian language of the Indo-European family, with around 60 million speakers across Afghanistan (where it is co-official with Dari) and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. It has three main dialect groups — Southern (Kandahari) which preserves more retroflexes, Northern (Yusufzai), and Central (Waziri). The standard literary form differs between Kabul and Peshawar.

What grammar features does Pashto have?

Pashto uses an extended Perso-Arabic alphabet of around 44 letters with extra characters for retroflex sounds (ټ, ډ, ړ, ڼ) and for /ʂ/ and /ʐ/ written ښ and ږ. Grammar has two genders, split ergativity in the past tense (the perfective transitive subject takes a 'oblique' form and the verb agrees with the object), postpositions and 'ambipositions' (circumpositions) that surround the noun. LingoBear lets you see these patterns in real text.