Mela: Learn Maltese

Everyone in Malta speaks English. Learn Maltese anyway.

Nobody expects a foreigner to try, which is exactly why it lands. Two words of Malti at the counter and you stop being another tourist doing the bays, or an expat of four years who never learned to say thank you.

Mela teaches Maltese with flashcards, ten cards at a time. A session takes about five minutes, and it works on the ferry, because the whole thing lives on your phone.

WHY LEARN MALTESE WHEN EVERYONE SPEAKS ENGLISH
Because that is the point. Maltese has around half a million speakers and almost nobody learns it from outside, so the effort reads instantly. Grazzi instead of thanks, bonġu instead of morning, and the exchange stops being a transaction.

TEN CARDS, THEN YOU'RE DONE
A session is always ten Maltese flashcards. Not nine, not fifty, and not configurable. Flip a card, say whether you knew it, and spaced repetition decides when you see it next: 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, then 21. Miss one and it returns tomorrow.

Three buttons, and only three : Missed it, Again, Knew it. No typing, no microphone, no minigames.

WORKS OFFLINE. NO ACCOUNT. EVER.
No sign-up, no email, no password, no cloud. Every card, every recording and all your progress sit on the device - which means Mela cannot see any of it.

593 CARDS ACROSS 24 PACKS
The packs run in the order you actually meet the language, in seven stages:

• First words — the first ten minutes on the island
• Your first week — ordering, paying, getting around
• Living here — the words you need once the holiday ends
• Holding your own — longer sentences, and putting it together
• Making sentences — because, but, and what you did yesterday
• When it gets real — the calendar, the doctor, the landlord
• Sounding Maltese — colours, opinions, and what people actually say

HEAR IT, THEN SAY IT
Every one of the 593 cards is spoken aloud in two Maltese voices — pick Grace or James, and switch whenever you like. Each card also carries a plain-English respelling, so you can try the pronunciation before the recording plays: "Grazzi ħafna" reads as "GRAT-see HAF-na". No IPA to decode. Getting the ħ and the għ roughly right is most of what makes someone smile rather than switch back to English.

A STREAK THAT ISN'T A PUNISHMENT
One session a day keeps it going. Miss a day and the streak survives it once a month, automatically — nothing to buy, no "restore your streak" offer.

Two notifications a day at most: the reminder you chose, and a nudge if a live streak is about to lapse. Both are scheduled by your own phone. Mela has no push server.

WRITTEN FOR TWO PEOPLE
You land on Thursday. Bonġu at the counter, grazzi to the driver, skużani through a full bus — a week to learn, and remembered by everyone you use it on.

You have been here three years. Your colleagues switch to Maltese at lunch and switch back for you, politely, every time. Ten cards a day fits inside a working week.

WHAT YOU GET
• 593 Maltese words and phrases, from greetings to the past tense
• 24 packs in teaching order, across seven stages
• Audio for every card in two Maltese voices
• Plain-English pronunciation on every card, no phonetic alphabet
• Spaced repetition that schedules reviews for you
• Fully offline — the entire vocabulary ships inside the app
• No account, no sign-in, no ads, no data leaving the phone

HOW THE PACKS OPEN
Pack one, Greetings & first words, is 30 cards and it is open the moment you install. No timer, no daily cap, no ads.

The other twenty-three are opened one at a time and kept for good, or all together with Mela Full — an auto-renewing monthly subscription that opens all 24 packs while it is active. It is charged to your Google Play account and renews unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the period ends, any time in Google Play subscriptions.

Terms of Use: https://mela.cbscala.com/terms
Privacy Policy: https://mela.cbscala.com/privacy

Mela is the Maltese for "well then / of course / go on". It is card 26 of the first pack.