Swahili Class... for you?

 Hi Friends,

**Especially my friends who are interested in other languages,

First Day of School!

I thought I should give an update on how language school is going. Overall, I think it going well. It is hard and we are moving pretty fast; but I think it will be good in the long run. You see- we have three months in total of language school and then we move to Musoma. There is no way we can become fluent in Swahili in three months but at the pace we are going we will be able to continue learning and studying after we move. I have also tried to underline any Swahili words and give there meanings- if I missed any and you’re curious you can comment below and I will try to answer to the best of my ability- don’t trust google translate. 

Side bar- if language isn’t your thing, feel free to skip to the ‘overall’ part for a laugh and the ‘lion king’ part for some fun facts. 

Ruels

At first we started with the alphabet- which has 26 Vitamkwa (consonants / sounds) plus 5 Irabu (vowels). A consonant consists of one or two letters and a vowel sound so the first one is- ba then there is be, bi, bo, bu and so on. There are also others that are not so self explanatory like dha makes the th sound for example dhahabu (which means gold) is pronounced tha•HA•boo or like gha/ghe/ghi/gho/ghu which has a phlegm sound and (according to our teacher) is derived from Arabic language. An example of this would be ghuba (which means gulf- as in gulf of Mexico or gulf of Lake Victoria) which is pronounced hhh•OO•ba (I don’t know how the dictionary would write it but that seems pretty accurate to me).

Then we started learning the rules- unlike English there are only 4 rules. Rule #1: silabi (syllable) consists of one Konsonanti (consonant) and one Irabu (you already know what that means ;). For example- baba is two syllables- ba and ba (that means dad). Rule #2: Double Vowels each form their own syllable. For example- paa is two syllables PA•a (that means roof or antelope/deer/thing). Rule #3: Double connects each form a syllable **shocker** so mtoto has three syllables m•TO•to (that means kid/child). Rule #4: is specific to the letters Y or W basically if they have a vowel they are one syllable. So the word nywa is one syllable (it means drink but you would probably never say it like that) ku means to so usually people say kunywa (to drink)- also, if you hadn’t noticed a lot of sentences become one word like this. 

After we learned the rules it was time to get into grammar and I felt like I was back in sixth grade English class trying to remember what pronouns and demonstratives were. But then it was time for the fun stuff- greetings! 

Greetings

Greetings are very important in Tanzanian culture- if you don’t ask someone how they are and how their family is and how their home is and just get straight to business it is VERY rude. So we spent a good couple of weeks learning all the different greetings and I found it very interesting. Fun fact- Jombo (which is one of the few Swahili words Americans know) basically just means ‘hi tourist’ ; but Hakuna Matata translates to ‘we have no problems’ so I guess that’s pretty accurate if you were curious. 

Probably the most common greetings we get on the street are: Karibu (welcome) and the response is Asante (thanks) and Mambo (what’s up// you good) response- Poa (cool) this is an informal/youth greeting (ie if you come visit- don’t say this to someone older than you). We also get ‘unzungu’ on the street a lot which means white person, usually we just say hi to that lol most of the time it is by the little kids who can’t even say the whole word yet and it come out ‘zungu’. In my opinion this is not offensive at all it is just an observation that we are white and that that is such an anomaly here- sometimes it is even a parent pointing it out to a small child as a teaching moment, which I think is pretty cool. Nevertheless, every morning when we walk to school the neighborhood kids get exited to see the ‘zungu’s’ and the feeling is mutual <3

There is also special greetings depending on where you are/who you are- if you are in a catholic church or speaking to a Religious you would say ‘Tumsifu Yesu Kristu’ (Praise Jesus Christ) response ‘Milele, Amina’ (Forever Amen). We used this a lot when we visited Kitanga (see last post) and talked with the IHSA sisters. There are special greetings for all different situations- wether you enter a mosque, temple, school, home, resturant, or on the town. 

Intros

After we learned greetings it was time to learn how to start conversations. How do we say ‘my name is…’ ‘I am from…’ ‘I live in…’ ect. We also learned how to ask other people those same questions. Then we learned how to introduce someone else and say ‘rafiki yangu’ (my friend). Yes- Rafiki really means friend *see lion king paragraph towards the bottom of this post*. We also learned how to introduce family members- mama, baba, ect. (Mom, Dad). 

When we started learning about the family members- we learned there are a lot more words for family here! Family is very important in Tanzanian culture so therefore there is a lot of specific words. For example- we have cousins; they have Binamu, Mototo wa Mjumba (maternal cousin), and Motto wa Shingazi (paternal cousin). So we tried to learn the whole family tree plus the in-laws (but still workin on all those words) 

Then we learned the Swahili words for countries and nationalities. For the US most people only use America so the translates to Marekani, so to say American you say Mmarekani, and Americans (plural) you say Wamarekani. We also learned a lot of other countries and nationalities. So then we could say we were from ‘Marekani’

Out and About

Then it was time to learn how to go to the market, restaurants, and stores! So we learned all the vocab- different names of fruits and veg, drinks, main dishes, side dishes, ect. We also learned about Pesa (money).

After that it was time to start learning numbers! The hardest part is learning moja through kumi (one through ten) then you just start adding- so to say eleven you say ‘kumi na moja’ (ten and one) and so on- kumi na mbili (ten and two- 12), Kumi na tatu (ten and three- 13), ect. 

Time and Date

Cultural Day- Charels is showing
us the different parts of Africa 

After that it was time to learn about the Kalenda (calendar) and the kamili (clock). We learned the days of the week, the names of the months (which are pretty easy they basically translate to ‘month one’ ‘month two’ etc), and the times of day. The times of day are pretty important as they use these instead of AM/PM there are several different times- for example Alfajiri is early morning (4-6am) and Asubuhi is morning (7-12am). They also just do time differently- basically the day doesn’t start at midnight- it starts when the sun rises so that’s usually 7am. So 7am is Moja Asubuhi (one in the morning). Which logically makes sense when you think about it- like who thought the middle of the night should be the start of the day, anyway? Lol

Overall

So we are about half way through our three month program and I think we are doing well so far. We have a long way to go and I think a lot of the learning will just be immersion when we get to Musoma (where very very few people speak English). I am happy with how far I have come in just a short time. I also thought it might be fun to give you a few antidotes of how funny it can be to learn a new language. 

When I first tried to learn Swahili I was in high school and I was convinced that I was going to move to Eastern Africa one day (never give up on your dream kids- if you believe it you can achieve it and all that other inspirational stuff). I basically just used google translate and a few websites (there isn’t much on Swahili out there really) but for some reason the first word I learned was Nafsi (which means people). Because this was the first word I learned- it kept getting stuck in my head when we would practice in class. So- when we were learning introductions instead of saying unatoka wapi (where are you from?) I said ‘nafsi wapi’ (where are people). 

Another funny story with the word Nafsi is from a test that we took a couple weeks after that. Our teacher basically put a mad libs type of question on the board- like, make a sentence that looks like pronoun + tense marker + verb stem + noun. So I went through all the questions filling in what I knew. I knew Nafsi was a noun- so anywhere I saw a blank for a noun that’s what I put. I knew the word for eat was Kula so anywhere I saw a blank for a verb that’s what I put… you can see where this is going right? For the specific question I mentioned above I wrote ‘Mnakula Nafsi’ (you plural or Y’all eat people) YALL EAT PEOPLE! And the worst part is- because I wasn’t writing them as sentences I just went through all the questions and filled in all the nouns then all the verbs and so on- I didn’t even realize until it was graded and handed back to me! Lol  

Another funny story is when we were trying to learn the word for barber- Kinyozi and I accidentally said Kinyesi… which means poop. The teacher really got a kick out of that one!

Anyway, overall learning a new language is hard and you’re going to make mistakes, but learning to laugh at yourself is key and knowing you will not be perfect for a long time. Also- a good teacher and Duolingo help too! I hope you enjoyed this little summary of what we’ve learned so far and now for the fun stuff-

The Lion King

Throughout this post I have mentioned some lion king references here and there that I thought might be a little interesting to you all. I have added some extra ones here that I have learned so far: 

First of all- the lion king is not all one language- they actually use English (obvi), Swahili, Zulu, and Xhosa. These languages come from all over the content of Africa so Disney was either trying to be inclusive or they were just being dumb Americans. 

The lion king got some things right in Swahili, but actually most of the movie uses Zulu language which is an ethnic group spread out over seven southern countries in Africa. The movie also uses some Xhosa which is the language of the Nguni people who mostly reside on the southeastern coast of South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Botswana. Xhosa and Zulu are also two of the 11 official languages of South Africa. 

I also found it interesting that in the beginning of the movie, you see the sun rising and all the animals coming to life and here in Tanzania a new day begins then the sun rises. As previously stated, here- 7am is actually 1 ‘in the morning’ 8 is 2 and so on. 

Anyway, for your trivia knowledge- Simba means lion (Swahili), Mufasa means king (Manazoto), Rafiki means friend (Swahili), and the opening song basically just says ‘here comes a lion, oh yes he is a lion’ over and over in Zulu. There are a lot of other subtleties in the movie but as of right now those are the only ones I feel confident in confirming, but you can google more than that if you would like. Most of it is probably decently accurate. 

I hope you enjoyed your Swahili lesson. <3 Until next time...