Gurmukhi with romanisation underneath — start reading from day one.
Many people come to Punjabi from an unusual starting point: they have heard it their whole life without ever reading it. They know how a sentence should sound but cannot spell a single word. If that is you, you are not a beginner — you are a reader who has not started reading yet, and that is a much shorter distance.
Every Punjabi word here is shown in Gurmukhi with a romanised spelling underneath. ਪਾਣੀ appears with pāṇī beside it. You can play the whole game from the romanisation on day one, and the shapes of the script quietly become familiar while you do.
Thirty-five base letters, written left to right, with vowel marks attached to consonants rather than sitting between them. Unlike English, it is close to phonetic: once you know a letter, it sounds the same nearly everywhere. Most people who put in a few focused hours can sound out simple words, even if reading fluently takes much longer.
The horizontal line running across the top of the words is not decoration. It joins the letters of a word, which is what tells you where one word ends and the next begins.
Punjabi is one of the few Indo-Aryan languages with tone. The pitch of a syllable can change what a word means, which is why two words that look almost identical in romanisation can be entirely different words. Romanisation will get you started; it cannot carry you all the way. At some point you have to listen to someone speaking, and there is no software substitute for that.
A child raised outside Punjab often understands far more than they can say, and can say far more than they can read. The gap widens quietly, year by year, until reading feels like a wall. Ten words a day is small enough that a child will actually do it, and the example sentences give them something to say rather than just something to recognise.
Set "I speak" to English or German, leave the target on Punjabi, and let them start from where they already are.