About Ladoo
Ladoo exists because of a gap every diaspora kid knows: you understand the Punjabi spoken around you, and you cannot answer back. You follow the dinner-table conversation and freeze when it is your turn. The big language apps never solved this because most of them never bothered with Punjabi at all.
Ladoo is made by Ladoo LLC, a small company started by Yuvraj Dhamija and based in California. A ladoo is the round sweet passed around at every celebration; we picked the name because learning your family's language should feel like that, not like homework.
What we build
Ladoo is built for two kinds of learners: complete beginners starting Punjabi from zero, and heritage speakers who understand Punjabi but can't speak it. The app teaches spoken Punjabi and the script you pick, Gurmukhi or Shahmukhi, as two separate tracks, so heritage speakers who already understand the language can go straight to the parts they are missing, and beginners can build from the ground up. There are 170+ bite-size lessons, all of them free, a script track that goes from zero to reading in either script, with finger tracing on every letter, eight illustrated stories narrated line by line, and Bhaji, an AI tutor that speaks Punjabi with you and drills the things that trip you up. Speaking is graded word by word, because getting the words out of your mouth is the whole point.
How the content gets made
The curriculum is built in-house, word by word: the vocabulary bank alone runs past 1,200 entries, each with the script, romanization, and audio. Lessons ship after a native-speaker review pass, and when native speakers disagree with the textbook form, we side with how people actually speak. Pronunciation audio covers every letter, word, and story line in the app.
The education program
Gurdwara Punjabi schools and classroom teachers get Ladoo Pro free for their students through our education program. Keeping Punjabi alive in the diaspora is a shared project, and the classes doing that work should not have to pay us for it.
Talk to us
Questions, corrections, and blunt feedback all reach a human at [email protected]. If you spot a mistake in a lesson, we want to hear about it; the fastest fixes in the app have come from learner emails.
See it for yourself. Every lesson is free on iPhone and Android.