Allegra - Learn Swiss Romansch

Allegra teaches Sursilvan — the Romansh of the Surselva valleys, spoken at the top of the Rhine.

Not "Romansh" in general. Romansh has five written standards and a sixth, Rumantsch Grischun, that was built in the 1980s to sit above them. This app teaches Sursilvan, the idiom with the most speakers, and says so on the first screen.

A COURSE YOU CLIMB

The 17 chapters are laid out as a route, from the valley floor to the summit — Val at the start, a Camona halfway, Spitg at the top. The ibex marks where you are standing, so you always know how far you have come.

WHAT IS IN IT

• 85 lessons across 17 chapters, from your first Allegra to talking about work, weather, family and grief
• 1,537 words, each with its meaning, its pronunciation and a Sursilvan example sentence
• 24 dialogues — the restaurant, the station, the doctor, a job interview, the village feast, a kitchen
• A dictionary of every word the course teaches, searchable in five languages
• Flashcards with spaced repetition, so a word you nearly forgot comes back before you do
• A word each day and a 60-second daily challenge
• Two home-screen widgets: today's word, and your daily goal with your streak

PRACTICE THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF

Practice mixes question types: matching, filling the gap in a sentence, typing the word from memory, multiple choice, and true or false in the daily challenge.

Get one wrong and the app shows you why — the word with its gender and pronunciation, its meaning in your language, and the sentence it was taught in. For the words that break the pattern, about a hundred of them, there is a tip: the plurals where the vowel shifts, and the verbs that are irregular.

A LITTLE EVERY DAY

Set a daily goal of 50, 100 or 200 XP and watch the ring close. Keep a streak — one missed day a week is forgiven, because a streak should not punish having a life. Twenty badges mark the milestones, from your first lesson to the summit, each one pressed like a wax seal when you earn it. The goal, the streak, the badges and your progress are free for everyone.

MEANINGS IN FOUR LANGUAGES

Every word is glossed in English, German, Italian and French, and you can switch at any time. German is the useful one — every Romansh speaker is bilingual in it — but all four are complete.

WHY THE WORDS ARE RIGHT

A learner cannot tell a correct word from a plausible one. That is the whole problem with a small-language course, and it is what this app is built around.

Every Romansh word here is traceable to the Pledari Grond, the dictionary published by the Lia Rumantscha. Not "looks Romansh" — attested, with the meaning the app claims for it. The whole course has also been checked against the Mediomatix corpus, half a million words of Sursilvan schoolbooks written for Grisons schools.

And if you find one that is wrong, you can report it from the screen it is on. The app attaches a picture of the screen and opens a mail draft on your own account; nothing is sent until you send it.

WHAT IS NOT CLAIMED

No native speaker has reviewed these sentences. They are attested and grammatical, and whether they sound like something a person would actually say is not something a dictionary can tell you. The German, Italian and French glosses are a careful machine pass, labelled as such inside the app. The proverbs chapter is deliberately small, because proverbs cannot be verified the way the rest was.

FREE AND PREMIUM

The Basics chapter, the first two dialogues and one daily challenge a day are free, with no time limit and no account. Premium opens all 85 lessons, all 24 dialogues, all 1,537 flashcards and unlimited daily challenges. Monthly, yearly with a free week, or once and for good.

FOR WHOM

People with family in the Grisons. Anyone curious what Switzerland's fourth national language sounds like. And Romansh speakers who never learned to write it.

Grazia fetg for learning it. A language of forty thousand notices one more.

Allegra. Beinvegni.