Pāli Practice

About Pāli Practice

Pāli Practice is a 100% free, open-source app for learning Pāli language grammar, with a focus on verb conjugations and noun declensions. Pāli is the language of the early Buddhist texts preserved in the Pāli Canon (Tipiṭaka).

The app uses flashcard exercises that ask you to find the correct grammatical form. For verbs, you are shown a verb and asked to conjugate it for a given tense, person, and number. For nouns, you are asked to decline a word in a specific case, gender, and number. You think or say the answer yourself, then tap to check it, along with the word’s translation.

The app follows a spaced repetition approach. After each review, you mark items as easy or difficult, and they are shown again later depending on how well they are remembered.

Pāli Practice works fully offline and is designed for brief, regular study. It can be used whenever you have a free moment.

The app is intended for students of early Buddhist texts—such as the suttas of the Pāli Canon—who want a simple tool for practicing grammatical forms while studying the Buddha’s Dhamma. It supports ongoing study but does not replace textbooks, courses, or teachers. Word and grammar data are sourced from the Digital Pāli Dictionary project.

The icon is the quail from SN 47:6, the Sakuṇagghi Sutta (“The Hawk”), hiding behind clumps of earth in its ancestral territory—a newly plowed field with the soil turned up:

“Wander, monks, in what is your proper range, your own ancestral territory. In one who wanders in what is his proper range, his own ancestral territory, Māra gains no opening, Māra gains no foothold. And what, for a monk, is his proper range, his own ancestral territory? The four establishings of mindfulness.”

This app is maintained by the DhammaBytes contributors. We warmly welcome feedback and help with translating the app into other languages. Please contact us at [email protected]