Most people come at Patois through vocabulary, learn thirty words, and stall. The order below is the other way round, and it is the order the course uses.
1. The sounds first
Patois is hard for an English speaker to hear before it is hard to say. The shifts are regular — twelve of them cover most of it — and once your ear knows them, speech that sounded fast starts resolving into words you already know.
2. Then how it is written
There are two spelling systems and most of the internet mixes them. The Cassidy-JLU system gives one letter one sound, which makes everything after it easier to read.
Nothing above teaches you to speak. Reading about a language and producing it are different skills, and only one of them takes practice. That is what the app is for — drills, spaced repetition, and a pronunciation check that measures what your mouth is doing rather than guessing.
Where it comes from
Every claim on this site is checked against published work and the citations are on the pages. The full list is here.