I've always wondered why I don't speak my language fluently.
Growing up, I was always code-switching between Igbo and English. English won, mostly because it was everywhere. In school, on my phone, in my ambitions. Igbo, my native language, was reserved for special occasions: greeting my grandmother, church announcements, or those moments when adults didn't want young people to understand what they were saying.
Sadly, this reality isn't just mine. It's the reality of millions of young Nigerians watching their language disappear in real time. As my close ones always say — language is culture, and culture is language.
That's why I built PARROT.

What is PARROT?
PARROT is an AI-powered African language app that teaches indigenous African languages, starting with Igbo and Yoruba, through daily lessons, culturally rich games, and an AI companion that understands what these languages actually mean.
The core insight that drove me to build this was simple: people don't lose their language because they're lazy. They lose it because the language was never attached to anything they actually live by. It never felt theirs.
PARROT fixes that.

The MeDo Hackathon, My Opportunity to Build It
When I heard about the MeDo Hackathon, I knew this was my moment. In the past five days, using the MeDo platform, I shipped five core features:
ODE: a structured language learning path with levels named in the language itself. You start at Ntọala — Foundation — and build from there through greetings, family words, proverbs, and cultural expressions.

Daily PARROT **: every day, one word. Its pronunciation, its cultural story, and the context that no textbook ever gave you. You practice it. You earn feathers.
**PARROT Arena: three games in one lobby. Hear and Match trains your ear. Proverb Drop teaches you what your ancestors knew. Africa Drop covers everything they didn't teach you in school. Did you know the Great Wall of Benin was longer than the Great Wall of China?
PARROT SINGS (beta): paste any lyrics, and PARROT rewrites them in Igbo or Yoruba, breaking down every cultural reference along the way.
Ask PARROT, in every game and lesson, you can stop and ask PARROT for the full cultural story behind what you're learning. You always leave knowing more than when you arrived.

What I Learned
This was my first time vibe coding. I never expected to walk away with a full-stack consumer app packed with AI integrations, but the MeDo platform made it possible in a way I genuinely didn't anticipate. It handled the heavy lifting so I could focus on what actually mattered: the idea, the culture, and the experience.
But the biggest thing I learned had nothing to do with code.
The best products don't start with features. They start with something deeply personal something wrong in the world that you can't stop thinking about.
For me, it was sitting with my grandparents and realising I couldn't fully talk to them in their own language. That I had inherited everything from their culture except the words it was built in.
PARROT is my answer to that.

It's Not Finished, But It Ships
We're working on 54 languages. A mobile app. A plugin that brings your language into every website you visit. More games. More culture. More PARROT.
But what's live right now is real, and it works.

Try PARROT
Whether you're African, reconnecting with your roots
or from anywhere else in the world, curious about where humanity began, this app is for you.
We believe humanity's first words were African because humanity originated in Africa.
It's time we all spoke them.
👉 [Try PARROT here]