Free app for practicing Pāli noun declensions & verb conjugations

AV
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Hello everyone,

I wanted to share my app Pāli Practice that I’ve been building in the past months, and finally got it released on all major platforms: Android, iPhone/iPad, Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can find the download links on the landing page.

It’s a free and open-source program built upon the Digital Pāli Dictionary’s database. Technically, those are flashcards with spaced repetition, but the UI was designed specifically for DPD’s content, and also there are some adjustments that try to counterbalance the spaced repetition’s “snowball effect”: new forms are introduced at a steady pace, rarer tense and case combinations are given more weight in the practice queue, and each session mixes easier and harder “due” items.

The app is 100% private (no data collected), works fully offline, and runs on many older devices like Android 7 or iOS 15. It supports ongoing practice but is not a replacement for textbooks, courses, or teachers :wink:

The icon is the quail from SN 47:6, the Sakuṇagghi Sutta (“The Hawk”), hiding behind rocks in its ancestral territory.

Hope it will help your studies and I’m open to any feedback to make the next updates better.

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Hooray and thank you! I have downloaded Pali Practice to my own phone. I regularly study ES and PT on my phone, so adding Pali to that study will be very fruitful.

We are currently working on scVoice for iPhone with full offline capability as well. Some questions bubbled up into my head:

  • if scVoice and Pali Practice are both on same phone, will they be able to refer to each other with on-device URLs? For example, if someone on scVoice is reading a sutta and sees an unfamiliar word, can they click on that word and have Pali Practice open that DPD entry in Pali Pracice? We use DPD within sc-voice.net, but that implementation hasn’t yet been ported to iOS. With a Pali Practice having the DPD on the same device, the two apps could use mutually beneficial content links.
  • Any chance you might support Larger Text? I cannot read the declension tables
  • We might have a shared challenge in supporting the narration of Pali. I think the DPD has ability to play a Pali word but I’m not sure if Pali Practice has that yet.
  • I am guessing you might be using Flutter for broad platform coverage? scVoice is iOS native to use latest on-device speech synthesis.

:folded_hands:

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For example, if someone on scVoice is reading a sutta and sees an unfamiliar word, can they click on that word and have Pali Practice open that DPD entry in Pali Pracice

Pāli Practice uses a trimmed-down subset of DPD database, which is over 2 GB originally. Because of its inflection focus, there are only 1500 most used noun lemmas and 750 verb lemmas, with some overly long compounds excluded, so it’s not quite suitable as a dictionary (in fact, there’s currently no search/list screen at all, though that’s something I may add later).

I think a dedicated mobile app for DPD would be a better option eventually. Probably it can expose deep links for other Pāli-related apps to quickly open the necessary translations.

Any chance you might support Larger Text? I cannot read the declension tables

Sorry about that, I have a long Accessibility ToDo – creating apps with cross-platform UI frameworks has a downside of not being able to take advantage of all built-in accessibility features on each platform, like automatic font sizing.

We might have a shared challenge in supporting the narration of Pali. I think the DPD has ability to play a Pali word but I’m not sure if Pali Practice has that yet.

I haven’t looked into it yet, but in theory it should be possible to embed a text-to-speech engine in Pāli on all platforms. The idea is to keep the app independent from the internet, so one can practice in places with no connectivity.

I am guessing you might be using Flutter for broad platform coverage? scVoice is iOS native to use latest on-device speech synthesis.

It’s Uno Platform which is conceptually similar to Flutter, but built with .NET and C#. I do native iOS development too, so hopefully I can port it at least to Android.

I regularly study ES and PT on my phone, so adding Pali to that study will be very fruitful.

I have an app for Spanish verb practice too, though it’s commercial – feel free to DM me if you’d like a free promo code for the full version.

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Ah interesting. Yes i will probably be bringing GitHub - sc-voice/ms-dpd: Pali Javascript library over to swift for use in scVoice. I am unfamiliar with Uno but used .net back in J# days. Apple has on-device urls for inter-app reference so that users can navigate between apps using links.

I love spaced repetition (what algo do u use?) and plan to add spaced repetition to scVoice/iOS based on user searches to reinforce memorization and recall. Our searches have timestamps and relevance scores with that in mind. It would be great if we could introduce users to pali and Practice Pali via their own searches in modern languages.

scVoice/iOS is in beta and Pali support is planned for later this year so our horizon for Pali Practice integration would be late 2026-27.

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I love spaced repetition (what algo do u use?) and plan to add spaced repetition to scVoice/iOS based on user searches to reinforce memorization and recall.

A custom one, it’s not sophisticated mathematically and is instead bucket-based – doing its best to avoid presenting similar items consecutively. You can check its comments in the source code.

scVoice/iOS is in beta and Pali support is planned for later this year so our horizon for Pali Practice integration would be late 2026-27.

Perfect, I think I also need about a year of actively using the app myself to see what’s missing from the overall user experience.

Thanks for working on that! Pronunciation has been on my wishlist for Pāli Practice from the beginning :star_struck:

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