About Mamlo

Aramaic (also known as Oromoyo / Turoyo) is a living Neo-Aramaic language. It is the mother tongue of a significant part of the Syriac community, historically rooted in the Ṭur ʿAbdin region of southeastern Turkey, the "Mountain of the Servants of God", and the surrounding areas of modern Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.

Today, most native speakers live in diaspora communities in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and North America, following decades of emigration. Estimates place the speaker community at roughly 100,000–300,000 people worldwide.

Despite its small size, Aramaic is a fully living language: it is spoken in homes and at community gatherings, used in churches, and preserved through music and oral tradition. It is also the subject of growing academic study and language revitalisation efforts.

Aramaic is written in the Serto variant of the Syriac script, a cursive alphabet that descends from the ancient Aramaic script. Syriac is one of the oldest continuously used writing systems in the world, with a history of over two millennia.

Like Arabic and Hebrew, Syriac is written right to left. The characters are joined and form a flowing, calligraphic line. Vowels are usually indicated by diacritical marks rather than letters. The script appears throughout this app with a dedicated typeface (Noto Sans Syriac) for legibility.

↑ šlomo (peace) · bayto (house) · babo (father) · maye (water) · ṭuro (mountain)

The vocabulary and lesson structure in this app are based on the Šlomo Surayt online course, produced by the Surayt Aramaic Online Project (SAOP) and available at textbook.surayt.com. The course is a comprehensive introduction to Oromoyo across two levels, covering themes from everyday life, family, food, and travel to sports and technology.

Mamlo is an independent fan project that uses the SAOP course as its vocabulary source to create interactive exercises. It is not affiliated with the project authors. If you enjoy this app, please visit the original course for full depth and audio.

All vocabulary content is drawn from the Šlomo Surayt course, created by the Surayt Aramaic Online Project, a research initiative funded by the EU Erasmus+ programme (2017–2020) via the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service).

Mamlo is a free, open-access web app inspired by Duolingo's approach to language learning: short daily sessions, immediate feedback, and spaced repetition to reinforce memory. It is built for anyone who wants to take their first steps in Aramaic, whether you have family roots in the community or are simply curious about one of the world's oldest living language traditions.

• 25 topics, 64 lessons across 2 levels (Level 1 foundations · Level 2 everyday topics)
• 4 exercise types: multiple choice, free typing, word matching, and sentence building
• SM-2 spaced repetition for vocabulary review
• Progressive web app, installable on iOS and Android
• Free account (optional), sign in to sync your progress across all your devices
• No ads, no paywalls, completely free

Mamlo combines two different approaches. Lessons are structured like Duolingo: short guided exercises with a fixed, verified vocabulary, unlocked step by step and reinforced with spaced repetition. Chat is different: an experimental AI model trained on the Oromoyo corpus that lets you write and converse freely, like ChatGPT, with no fixed path and no guaranteed answers.

• Lessons: guided and correct by design, ideal for building a foundation
• Chat: free-form and experimental (roughly one answer in three is wrong), ideal for practicing what you already know