How to learn Georgian vocabulary as a beginner

Georgian is not related to Russian, Turkish, Armenian or anything else you may have studied. It belongs to the Kartvelian family, spoken by around four million people, and almost nothing in it will look familiar. That is the bad news. The good news is that most of what makes Georgian hard for grammarians does not matter for vocabulary — and vocabulary is where a beginner should spend the first months.

Learn the alphabet first, and only the alphabet

Georgian is written in Mkhedruli, an alphabet of 33 letters with no capitals. Every letter is one sound, every sound is one letter. Once you know it, you can read any word aloud correctly on the first try — which is more than English or French can offer.

Give it two or three days, not two or three weeks. Learn the letters in groups: the ones that look like Latin letters but are not (ა a, ო o, ს s), the ones with tails, the ones with loops. Then read street names, brand names, anything. Do not learn words while the alphabet is still shaky; you will memorise shapes instead of sounds.

Mullawo's alphabet screen goes through all 33 with a sound and an example word for each — and, because no phone has a Georgian voice, the letters are read aloud from our server.

Ignore the verbs for now

You will read that Georgian verbs are the hardest part of the language, and it is true: a verb carries information about subject, object, tense and more, and the pieces change places. None of that is your problem in month one.

Learn verbs as single words in their dictionary form — the masdar, which works like an English "-ing" noun: სწავლა sts'avla "learning, to learn", ჭამა ch'ama "eating, to eat". You can say a great deal with a noun and a masdar before you conjugate anything. When you are ready for conjugation, you will already own the roots, which is most of the work.

Nouns are the easy part — take them

There is no grammatical gender. There are no articles. Plural is one ending, -ები -ebi: წიგნი ts'igni "book", წიგნები ts'ignebi "books". Cases exist, but the nominative you learn first is the form you will see in every list and every sign.

So nouns are cheap to collect, and they carry the most meaning per word. Start there: food, home, family, numbers, the days of the week, the words on a menu.

Say the hard consonants, do not skip them

Georgian has pairs of consonants that sound alike to a foreign ear: კ/ქ, პ/ფ, ტ/თ, წ/ც, ჭ/ჩ. The first of each pair is ejective — made with a small catch in the throat, marked with an apostrophe in transcription (k', p', t', ts', ch'). They change meaning: კარი k'ari is "door", ქარი kari is "wind".

You do not need to produce them perfectly at first. You do need to hear the difference, which means hearing the word, not only reading it. Tap the speaker on every card; tap it twice and the word is read slowly.

A first thousand words, by frequency

The most useful trick in any language: learn words in the order people actually use them. The thousand most frequent Georgian words cover the majority of what you will hear in a day; the ten-thousandth word is one you may never need.

Mullawo's Georgian dictionary is ranked by frequency, so the first cards you see are water, day, good, to go — not ornithology. Twenty new cards a day, five minutes, and in two months the first thousand are behind you. Spaced repetition decides which of them you need to see again and when; you only decide whether you knew the word.

Where the transcription helps and where it stops

Every Georgian word in Mullawo carries a Latin transcription in the national system (წყალი → ts'q'ali). Use it in the first week, while the alphabet settles. Then hide it in Settings and read the Georgian directly — the transcription is a crutch, and the whole point of a one-letter-one-sound alphabet is that you will not need it.

A realistic first month

• Days 1–3: the alphabet, until you can read a menu.
• Days 4–30: twenty cards a day, nouns and masdars, speaker on every card.
• Do not open a grammar book yet.

By day thirty you will read Georgian, recognise several hundred words in the street, and have the roots the verbs will later be built from. That is the month that decides whether a person keeps going — and it is a month of vocabulary, not grammar.