Learn Sindarin: A Free Eight-Lesson Beginner Course
Most Sindarin resources are either a word list or a full grammar. This course sits between them: eight lessons of roughly five minutes each, taking you from no Elvish at all to reading sentences like i aran iaur pent, “the old king spoke.” It runs in the browser, saves nothing to a server, and needs no account.
Start the lessonsWhat the eight lessons cover
| Lesson | Subject | What you can do afterwards |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Meet Sindarin | Pronounce c, ch, dh and the long vowels correctly |
| 2 | Naming things | Use the article i, and know why there is no word for “a” |
| 3 | Plurals | Recognise that adan becomes edain without adding an ending |
| 4 | Mutation | Read i varad and know to look up barad |
| 5 | Adjectives | Put the description after the noun, and mutate it |
| 6 | Verbs | Tell command, present, past and future apart |
| 7 | Possession | Read megil aran as “a king’s sword” |
| 8 | Reading | Work through whole sentences, then sit the final exam |
The four things that surprise English speakers
- Plurals change the vowels inside a word instead of adding an ending: adan “man” becomes edain “men”.
- The first consonant of a word shifts after certain small words. barad “tower” becomes i varad “the tower”, which is why looking words up is a skill of its own.
- Adjectives follow their noun and mutate after it, so “the green tower” is i varad galen.
- There is no word for “is”. “The king is great” is simply i aran beleg, two ideas placed side by side.
Sentences you will be able to read
| Sindarin | English | What is happening |
|---|---|---|
| i aran pêd | the king speaks | The long vowel in pêd marks the present tense |
| i aran iaur pent | the old king spoke | Adjective after the noun; pent is the past of ped- |
| in edhil linnatha | the elves will sing | in for a plural beginning with a vowel; -tha for the future |
| i varad galen | the green tower | Two mutations: barad to varad, then calen to galen |
| mellon nîn aran | my friend is a king | Possessive after the noun, and no linking verb at all |
| na varad galen | to the green tower | The preposition mutates the noun, and the noun mutates the adjective |
How the course works
- Each lesson is a few short cards with a comprehension check partway through, then a test at the end.
- You need 80% to pass a lesson and open the next one. Retakes reshuffle the questions and swap in alternative wordings.
- Missed a few? A review round replays only the questions you got wrong, as practice that is not scored.
- Every Sindarin form in the lessons is checked against this site’s own translator, so the course and the tool can never disagree.
- Progress is stored in your browser alone. There is no account, no sign-in, and nothing is sent anywhere.
What this course does not try to do
It teaches the spoken language, not the writing system. Tengwar is a script that can be used for several languages, including English, and it has its own transcriber and guides on this site.
It is a foundation rather than a complete grammar. Sindarin has more mutation types, verb classes and pronoun forms than eight lessons can hold; the Grammar panel in the app goes considerably deeper once you have the basics.
It is Sindarin only. Quenya is a separate language with its own plurals, case endings and word order, not a dialect of the same tongue.