Teach Yourself Swahili, Part 1

Well, I would say 3 weeks in that I was possibly a little ambitious as to how much I would be able to achieve during language training. It is one thing to make yourself understood but quite another to get to grips properly with a language. I’ve always known that, I am not sure why I temporarily overlooked it. Time to pull my head out of the sand.

My mornings have basically been spent wrapped up in ‘Teach Yourself Swahili’ which, having both taught and been taught various languages, I think is absolutely flawless as a learning aid. Some people said they found it too grammary. I fricking love grammar; the more the better (except obviously in the context of this sloppily written blog). So the more I understand the language the more I see exactly how the author has put together the book and why, which in turn helps me remember it. I have been busily unpicking bad habits forged when I previously lived in Iringa in 2003. I seem, for example, to have completely bypassed getting to grips properly with the different noun classes at that time. My audience must have been extremely tolerant people – I could only have sounded like I had just emerged from the cave, grunting and pointing.

(For those unfamiliar, Swahili has eight noun classes, which relate to either the kind of word and/or its origin. Swahili is a relatively simple language with fewer irregularities than English and a much more restricted vocabulary, but those verb classes are a major stumbling block and dare I say pain in the ass. All verbs, adjectives and even to some extent numbers are modified to agree with noun depending on its class. In essence you get eight slightly different words for ‘my’, for ‘this’ for ‘big’ (give or take a few). Summary: painful learning and makes for dull blog content.)

This self-teaching process is then supplemented in the afternoons when I hit the town and go and find someone to have a chat to. In the market I go to great pains to ask for ‘those mangoes over there’, just because I read about it in the morning. My market Swahili is coming on a treat. All the traders flatter me with great, although probably slightly tongue in cheek, compliments at my prowess. Little do they know if they asked me my favourite colour I would crumple into a dribbling mess. Some people are great at modifying their language. There is a guy at Sella’s work who has a great talent for grading his language so I can understand. We had a great chat for about 30 minutes and I was most buoyed at my progress. Then I come home and I can’t even understand Alvira when she asks me what I want for dinner.

In the evenings then, I go off to meet Sarah who is my Swahili teacher, in a rather loose sense of the word. Warning bells went off at her suitability as a teacher right at the beginning when, after quite a long chat about why I want to learn Swahili, where I learnt it before, family situation and musical and artistic interests (all of which took place in Swahili), she brought out some teaching resources with basic greetings on them. She seemed surprised when I said I felt I could do all that (in Swahili). They asked for more detail about what I wanted to learn. I gave an example of ‘this/that/these/those’. Even then they asked for more detail (in Swahili). I wasn’t really sure how to give more detail than that. The conversation was highly confusing. Anyway, despite all this I decided to take a chance as Sarah seemed like a pretty cool chick to me, and it’s not as if I had an enormous choice of language trainers here in Bagamoyo or any other pressing plans.

We proceeded to meet three times a week for about an hour and a half on the beach for lessons, speaking only in Swahili. Sarah normally had prepared 10 or so sentences using the language point, but the lesson would involve her repeating the sentences over and over again, even when I had no idea what was going on. The lessons therefore evolved more into a place where I could just practice what I had studied in my book, which in fact started to work really well. In a strange role reversal I started bringing my own flashcards and teaching ideas along to the lesson. Given she teaches lots of wazungu introductory Swahili maybe some of it will come in handy, who knows. And when the conversation began to flow more freely towards the end of the lesson I found out snippets of Sarah’s interesting life stories, having lived in India as a performance artist, Zanzibar working for a UNICEF arts programme and she has big hopes and dreams for the future.

Lastly, all this has been supplemented by picking up appropriate vocab to life here in Bagamoyo, ably abetted by Alvira and Sella. In the village I seem to remember I knew the names of different kinds of insects, that thing that you sort rice on, the moon, a hoe, mud. These days I am more likely to need the vocab for electricity, the water is back on, humid, there is a live gig tonight, he was wasted and I prefer wood carvings over performance art thank you. Oh and today I learnt ‘Wow, I really stink, I need to shower’, whereas I would say in the village the other extreme would probably have been more noteworthy.

Anyway, onwards and upwards to a three week intermediate Swahili course in Arusha. I just hope after all this I’m ready!