Reddit reviews Lonely Planet Sinhala (Sri Lanka) Phrasebook & Dictionary

You're lucky you have a good start learning the basics in a class. I'm assuming that you're only learning spoken language not written, the grammar in spoken Sinhala is a lot more simple which is great.

Finding Sri Lankans to chat with is the best way to learn in my opinion, that's how I learnt almost everything. I used Conversation Exchange but reddit works too. There will always be lots of Sri Lankans who want to improve their english.

When you're skyping with Sri Lankans you can either agree to split up the time into half English and half Sinhala, or you could switch back and forth between English and Sinhala throughout the call. I did the latter because it's more casual, although I think it was a mistake. I prepared stuff to talk about beforehand but since my Sinhala was always worse than their English we often talked in English until I knew how to say something in Sinhala. They didn't often speak Sinhala so right now my listening ability is quite behind my speaking ability.

There aren't many online resources for speaking. The dictionaries tend to have more written Sinhala words than spoken Sinhala (especially google translate). The best dictionary I've found for spoken words is Lonely Planet's phrasebook, or the best online dictionary is Tamil Cube. Have you seen Dilshan's Lazy but smart sinhala blog? It covers some good topics for beginners although it's mostly vocabulary not grammar.

Keep in mind that everyone uses a different system to write sinhala with the english alphabet. Especially the ways vowels are written changes a lot, that often confused me at the start. Even if you're only learning to speak I think it's worth learning the Sinhala script over time so that you can check the spelling yourself when in doubt. If you are typing to people you can write the spoken words and it comes across as friendly/casual. Many symbols look the same but I learned it eventually by copy-pasting what friends write into google translate and it shows a phonetic version below the sinhala text.

Best of luck in continuing to improve after university. Keep enjoying conversing with Sri Lankans and don't be afraid to make mistakes!