Direction, Tone, and Your First Sentence
Put it together: right-to-left reading, a first look at tone marks, and your first full NKo word chain.
You now know every letter shape in the NKo alphabet. Two habits make the difference between recognizing letters and actually reading: always scan right to left, and expect small marks above or below letters called tone marks.
Manding languages are tonal — the same letter sequence can mean different things depending on pitch. NKo marks this with combining diacritics above or below vowels. Tone marks are covered in depth in the Intermediate track — for now, just know they exist and that skilled readers rely on them.
Try reading right to left: ߒ ߞߊ ߝߊ߬ — 'n ka fa' roughly groups as 'I ... do/make ... father'. Full sentence grammar comes later, but you just decoded real NKo letter by letter, right to left, using only what you learned in this course.
Practice goal: by the end of Beginner, you should be able to sound out any short NKo word letter-by-letter, right to left, even without knowing what it means yet. That decoding skill is what Intermediate builds on.
Check your understanding
1. What do NKo tone marks indicate?
2. Decoding a new NKo word, you should scan: