What should Albanian beginners learn first?

Start with the alphabet and its sounds. Albanian is written in a 36-letter Latin alphabet that is almost perfectly phonetic, so an hour spent learning how each letter and digraph (like dh, gj, sh, xh, and the vowel ë) is pronounced pays off immediately — after that, you can read almost any word aloud correctly.

Next, build a core of high-frequency vocabulary and everyday phrases: greetings (përshëndetje, mirëmëngjes), please and thank you (të lutem, faleminderit), numbers, and simple questions. Alongside that, learn the present tense of the two most important verbs, jam ("I am") and kam ("I have"), which unlock a huge number of basic sentences.

A practical first path: learn the alphabet, then work through a beginner flashcard deck of the most common words, then take the free level test to see where you stand and which deck to do next. Shqipify's decks are ordered so you meet the highest-value words first.