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A Norwegian limited company based in Stavanger, founded in 2024.
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Shqipja e shtëpisë — Albanian the way the family speaks it
An app that teaches children Albanian. The language in the app is Kosovo Gheg, meaning Albanian as it is spoken at home in families from Kosovo, not the standard Albanian of school textbooks.
The app was made at home, for the developer's own children.
The developer speaks Albanian, and the children's mother speaks Norwegian. Both wanted the children to learn Albanian, but only one of them knew the language.
He first looked for something ready-made. Duolingo does not offer Albanian, and neither do Mondly or Drops. The little that exists for children is mostly built for standard Albanian, the language of school textbooks from Tirana. Families from Kosovo speak Gheg at home, and a child notices the difference.
The standard word for mum is nëna, while at home it is nana.
Since none of this covered the need, he built the app himself.
The app contains 999 words with pictures and audio across 44 categories, 186 everyday sentences, and the full alphabet of 36 letters. A child can learn from Norwegian, German, English or Albanian.
Because Norwegian is one of the source languages, a parent who does not speak Albanian can follow along and pick up some of the language too.
The repetition system was tested with a simulation of how a child forgets, run against the app's own settings and code. The main finding was that total time spent matters roughly three times more for learning than how the repetition is scheduled. The app is therefore built for short, frequent sessions.
The app sends no reminders. It only asks whether the child wants to continue once a goal has been reached. The child's interface has no countdowns and no purchase buttons. The app counts days in a row and celebrates them, but it never says anything when the run is broken.
The app collects no information about the child. Everything is stored locally on the phone, and a nickname is enough.
Around two million people of Albanian background live in Western Europe. Most of the children receive no Albanian instruction, usually because the nearest Saturday school is too far away.
That is a practical problem, and the kind of problem an app can help solve.