Learn Amharic Fidel‪!‬ 4+

Name: Learn Amharic Fidel!
Rating: 4.3 (3 reviews)
Author: Ethan Hartzell

Ethan Hartzell

Designed for iPad

- 4.3 • 3 Ratings

- Free

Description

The Amharic Fidel is an Abugida or Alphasyllabary, in which each character represents a syllable rather than a single sound.
Each consonant base can be modified to represent one of 7 vowels. There are altogether 34 consonant bases leading to ~238 characters + 49 more labialized sounds.
The apostrophe in the transliteration (') can represent a glottal stop on its own, or when combined with other sounds like (k') or (t') represent "ejective consonants."
Practice tracing each letter, then quiz yourself on them.
The syllable bases are split into two lists to make quizzing yourself on them a little more manageable. There is also a word scramble game and a typing game to help you learn to read common words and put them together.
Amharic also has its own way of writing numbers. The Fidel originally comes from how the Ge'ez language was written.

Mar 24, 2023

Version 1.03

fixed video url

4.3 out of 5

3 Ratings

Helpful - buuuut…

Okay, so this app is helpful if you kind of already know the fidel but need to review. The quiz feature is great and the word games are fun, but here are the drawbacks:
- there is no audio, so you aren’t really going to learn the fidel from this app becuase you won’t know how to pronounce the syllables (transliteration has significant limits)
- vowel sounds 1 and 5 are transliterated with the same vowel: e. For example, ሰ and ሴ are both transliterated “se” even though they are not pronounced the same.

I hope the app will be updated to include audio and distinguish between the eh and ey sounds.

The developer, Ethan Hartzell, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.