Learn Georgian from English at PBC Languages

Georgian uses its own alphabet, Mkhedruli, and once you've got the 33 letters down you're set: it's fully phonetic, one letter one sound, no silent letters and no capital/lowercase split to worry about. The wall most English speakers hit is the consonant clusters and the three-way sound distinctions: Georgian tells apart kari (wind), k'ari (door) and khari (ox), where English only has one 'k' sound. Add words with strings of consonants and no vowel to break them up, and even the capital's name, Tbilisi, is already a small lesson in this.

Because Georgian isn't an Indo-European language, real false friends with English are rare, most of what looks familiar is a genuine loanword that actually helps: bank'i, telefoni, restorani, kompiuteri, universit'et'i all mean exactly what you'd guess. The traps are the odd exception: magazia looks like 'magazine' but means shop, and mama isn't your mother, it's your father (deda is mother).

What moves fast: no grammatical gender anywhere, not even in the pronouns, and no articles to memorize, so you skip a whole category of mistakes English speakers make in other languages. What drags: the verb can pack subject and object into one word (polypersonal agreement), the subject switches to an ergative case with -ma in the past tense (aorist screeve), and numbers above twenty run on a base-twenty system, so 80 is built as 'four twenties', similar logic to old French.