What does "learnt off" mean?

Hmmm. I assume “learnt” = “learned”. And “learnt off” would mean “learned from”

But “learnt Jane Austen off” is different. Is it a typo?

Learnt is the accepted British English spelling. Learned is American English.

It means she could recite Austen from memory. “Leant Austen off by heart”

Memorized, although it is not something I commonly heard.

It means to commit to memory. We would usually say “learnt off by heart” which is a common expression in the UK.

^^ Yes, I have heard it that way.

The way it’s put on the wiki page suggest it’s wasn’t written by a native English speaker.

@Lightlyseared, in view of your comment, my guess would be that the more idiomatic phrasing would be “She had Jane Austen learnt off before her teens.” Is that right?

If I’d seen it structured that way, I’d have guessed the meaning.

American English does preserve some of those past tenses ending in t, sometimes side by side with the -ed version: e.g., burned, burnt; dreamed, dreamt. I do see and hear “learnt,” but not as commonly as it used to be—probably preserved the longest among my aged Canadian relatives.

If you learned it from a mistake, you learnt off a mistake. It’s slang. It’s English.

@Jeruba possibly. To my ear the missing “by heart” is what grates the most. I don’t think I’ve heard that turn of phrase without it.

Regarding burned vs burnt. I would use burned as a verb and burnt as an adjective. I burned the toast. The toast was burnt. Although either is probably correct.

@Lightlyseared, how does “She had learned/learnt Jane Austen by heart before her teens” (no “off”) sound to you?

I think you already got your answer, but my initial thought was slang written kind of oddly.

I assumed it meant “I learned from the best.”

Bad grammar.

@Jeruba that sounds better than with the missing ‘by heart’