Armenian, Greek, Arabic — and What's Next for DiasporaLearn

Three years ago, I was sitting in the back of an Armenian church in Glendale, watching my kid flip through a hymnal she couldn't read. The letters looked familiar to her — she'd seen them on signs, on her grandmother's cookbooks, on the wall at Sunday school. But she couldn't sound them out. Not really.

I pulled out my phone and searched for "learn Western Armenian online." The results were... not great. A couple of PDFs. A YouTube playlist from 2014. Nothing interactive, nothing structured, nothing that would hold a seven-year-old's attention for more than thirty seconds.

That afternoon, I started building HyeLearn.

HyeLearn: the Armenian chapter

HyeLearn launched as the answer to a question I couldn't believe nobody had answered: where's the Duolingo for Western Armenian?

Not Eastern Armenian, which has more speakers and more resources. Western Armenian — the language of the diaspora. The one UNESCO classifies as "definitely endangered." The one spoken by communities in Lebanon, Syria, France, the US, Canada, Argentina, and a dozen other countries where families are trying to pass it on with kitchen-table conversations and Saturday school worksheets.

I built a complete K-5 curriculum. Interactive exercises. Native audio pronunciation for every letter and word. A quest map where kids climb Mount Ararat, earning culturally themed badges along the way — pomegranates, khachkars, the duduk.

The response from Armenian families was immediate and emotional. Parents messaged me saying they'd been looking for something like this for years. Teachers at Armenian day schools started using it in their classrooms. One mom told me her son voluntarily practiced Armenian for twenty minutes straight, which she said had never happened in the history of their family.

Mathaino: "Can you build this for Greek?"

I got that email about six weeks after HyeLearn launched. Then another one. Then a message from a Greek Sunday school teacher in Melbourne.

Greek diaspora families face the same challenge. Greek schools exist in major cities, but most families don't live near one. The existing apps are either designed for tourists ("How do you say 'Where is the bathroom?' in Greek") or too academic for a six-year-old.

Mathaino launched with the same architecture: K-5 curriculum, interactive exercises, native pronunciation with Greek voices, and culturally relevant rewards. Olive branches instead of pomegranates. Mount Olympus instead of Mount Ararat. The Parthenon instead of Garni Temple.

I also built a full Sunday school track — 36 lessons for Greek Orthodox Sunday schools, with opening prayers, vocabulary, activities, and printable PDF worksheets. Because I kept hearing from teachers that they were cobbling together lesson plans from three different sources every Saturday night.

Ta3allam: Arabic joins the family

Arabic was the logical next step, and the most ambitious. Arabic-speaking diaspora communities are massive — Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinian, Egyptian, Iraqi, Jordanian families spread across every continent. Each community has its own dialect, but they're united by Modern Standard Arabic as a shared written language.

Ta3allam launched with a complete K-5 Arabic curriculum: all 28 letters, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and cultural content. The quest map takes students on a climb up the Mount of Olives. Badges celebrate Arabic calligraphy, the dallah coffee pot, and the cedar of Lebanon.

Building for Arabic also meant solving new technical problems. Right-to-left text rendering for content. Arabic font optimization. Text-to-speech with a Lebanese Arabic voice. None of it was trivial, but the Arabic-speaking community deserved the same quality as what we'd built for Armenian and Greek.

What we've built (so far)

Across all three platforms, DiasporaLearn now offers:

• 365+ interactive lessons across K-5 for three languages
• 72 Sunday school lessons with teacher guides and printable worksheets
• Native audio pronunciation for every word and letter
• A gamified quest map with culturally themed badges and XP
• Teacher dashboards for schools and classrooms
• Everything free — no paywalls, no premium tiers, no "upgrade to unlock"

All three platforms share the same codebase and the same philosophy: heritage language learning should be accessible to every family, regardless of where they live or what they can afford.

What's next

I get asked this a lot, usually by someone from a community we don't serve yet.

More depth in existing languages. More lessons, more exercises, more cultural content. I'm particularly focused on reading comprehension and conversational practice for grades 3-5, where the curriculum needs to get more sophisticated.

Arabic Sunday school. Armenian and Greek Sunday school tracks are live. Arabic is next.

More languages. I've heard from Assyrian, Farsi, Turkish, Hindi, and Tagalog-speaking communities. Each language has its own curriculum needs, its own cultural context, its own families who need these tools. I can't build them all at once, but the architecture is ready. The hardest part of adding a new language is the curriculum design and native audio — the tech scales.

Native mobile apps. The web platform works on any device, but dedicated iOS and Android apps are coming for a better mobile experience.

An invitation

If you're part of a diaspora community that needs heritage language tools, I want to hear from you. I can't promise I'll build for every language tomorrow, but every conversation helps me understand what's needed and what to prioritize.

DiasporaLearn isn't a startup chasing growth metrics. It's a mission funded by donations from families who believe heritage languages are worth preserving. If that resonates with you — support us, or simply tell a friend.

Every language that disappears takes a world with it. Every kid who learns their heritage language keeps that world alive.

Reach out anytime: hello@diasporalearn.org.