About kurdiyamin
A small school for a language the world almost forgot to teach.
Kurmancî is spoken by twenty million people. There are more learners of Latin online. That's the gap I wanted to close — gently, and from a kitchen table.
My grandmother taught me to count to ten in three languages before I could tie my shoes. Kurmancî was the one we used at the kitchen table in Pratteln, in a flat above a bakery in our quiet corner of Switzerland. It was the language of being held — and of being told to eat more bread.
When I left Pratteln for university I tried to find a Kurmancî class. There was nothing. There were a few books written for linguists and a handful of YouTube videos with broken sound. There was no course — no patient stranger willing to start at the beginning with you.
I started teaching one student at first. Then four. Then a small Discord with people from Zürich and Toronto and Diyarbakır. Kurdiyamin is what grew out of those tables.
It is what someone said to you
when they wanted you to feel safe.”
— Evîn Zerya, founder
The method
Five principles
I will not break.
Most of language learning is patience and the right next sentence. Everything below is a defence of that idea.
01
Listen first, speak second.
Guhdarî bike, paşê bibêje.
Every lesson begins with thirty seconds of audio you understand maybe half of. You will replay it three times. By the third time, you will not be translating in your head. That's where the language starts living.
02
Small daily, never big weekly.
Hindik û her roj.
Ten minutes a day will take you further than two hours on a Sunday. The lessons are sized for the bus, the kettle, the school pickup. If a day is too full, take a five-minute audio. That still counts.
03
Mistakes are the syllabus.
Şaşî mamosteyên me ne.
I will not correct your accent on day one. Or week three. We fix things when they start blocking meaning, not before. Embarrassment is the worst teacher in the world. I refuse to use it.
04
The kitchen is the classroom.
Mitbax dibistan e.
Every module ends with a real thing — a recipe, a song, a phone call to a real Kurdish bakery in your city. The grammar is in service of these. Not the other way around.
05
Dignity for the language.
Rûmet ji bo zimên.
Kurmancî has been forbidden, mocked, and treated as a dialect of something else. None of that happens here. You will learn it as the literary, ancient, complete language it is. With its own poets. Its own swear words. Its own jokes.
What we won't do
Some
polite refusals.
If any of these matter to you, kurdiyamin is not your school. That's all right.
Streak shaming.
We will never send you an email that begins 'Don't lose your streak!' Your relationship with the language is not blackmailable.
Leaderboards or XP.
You are not competing with anyone. The only person you'll catch up with is yourself, slowly.
AI conversation partners.
When you want to practice speaking, you talk to a person. We have humans for that. They are kind.
Speedrunning B2.
There is no fast track. There is no 'fluent in three months'. Anyone who tells you that is selling you a different product.
Politicising your lesson.
Kurdish history is full of grief. We honour it in the recipe stories and the poems. We do not lecture you while you are trying to learn how to ask for bread.
Colophon
Made with the help of these good people.
Thank you for reading this far. If any of it sounds like the kind of school you'd want, here's the door.