How I learnt Twi using flashcards
My mother tongue is Twi (Asante Twi) and that’s the first language I learnt to speak under the hot Kumasi sun. However, after my life took a detour to the UK at the tender age of four, my mother tongue also cashed out on me. I adopted the language of my new citizenship wholeheartedly, much to the demise of my Twi, which I’m told I used to speak like I was straight out of Manhyia Palace.
Years later, fed up with feeling like a tourist every time I returned to Ghana, I decided I had to learn Twi again. The problem? As any diaspora kid will tell you, family will be the first to laugh when you butcher your mother tongue… but they will be the last to help you fix it. And African parents are not exactly the most patient teachers. So if I wanted to learn Twi, I had to figure it out on my own.
One day, I stumbled upon a YouTube video of a polyglot who swore by digital flashcards for learning languages. The trick? Use images that mean something to you. A picture of your mum for “mother,” your favourite footballer for “ball,” anything that makes it stick.
It made perfect sense. So I downloaded a flashcard app and got to work. This was back in 2016, so Google Translate was not messing with Twi like that and keyboards were certainly not having any of the Twi alphabet, so “ɔ” was “o” and “ɛ” was “e”. But I still managed to scrape together about 100 words or so, and the file is still sitting on my laptop today.
It had no audio. Just words and pictures. But it worked a treat because the pictures were personal or an inside joke, so stickability was high. For instance…
The app let me set daily practice reminders, so every day I’d run through a handful of cards. Memorising these words helped me to patch together Twi and slowly started to unlock the sentences buried deep in my mind. My “brofo Twi” (English-Twi mashup) actually started to flow.
That’s why, when I discovered the Talking Flashcards device, I knew it was a game-changer. Unlike my DIY deck, you could have proper Twi audio, hundreds of words, and fun illustrations designed for kids. It’s exactly the tool I wish I had back in 2016!
And there you have it — the Tribal Tongue origin story 💪🏿!
If you like this, read Why German kids speak more Twi than UK kids.