Learning Kiswahili (plus a lesson for the grammatically curious)

Warning: this will probably only be interesting to language nerds

Having recently had a couple one-hour Kiswahili sessions with a private teacher, I have to say, at the end of a language lesson I’m left mentally exhausted, with a small headache from the sheer exertion of active listening and from the inability to form complete thoughts or sentences. A language teacher truly sees people at their most incapable: blustering with simple phrases and awkward social interactions in the target language. Communication is the fundamental way we exist in the world, and learning a new language is the purposive act of obliterating one’s ability to communicate in the world, moving back to the infant stage of communication (without the benefit of their incredible linguistic acquisition abilities) and learn not through natural repetition and observation but by memorizing lists of words on paper and codified grammatical rules.

There are many stages of language learning, depending on how you go about it. For me, the first period isn’t so painful. You can spend weeks, months, or years reading through a textbook, making word lists and flash cards, doing grammar exercises, listening to audio dialogues, doing simple back and forth conversations like ‘hello, how are you, what did you do today, I’d like some coffee please’. But eventually, you’ve learned a sufficient number of verbs, nouns, adjectives, and those crazy prepositions, conjunctions, and grammatical rules that hold them all together that you’re really on the verge of being able to communicate a practically infinite number of things by combining your knowledge of the language in different ways. This is what’s necessary to have real conversation, not just formulaic exchange. And yet, you’ve never ever had to do that! And when you try, you realize you’re missing all sorts of vocab, and grammar, and other things that you need, and you simply can’t think fast enough or remember enough of your flash cards to get out a whole sentence.

I think there’s a threshold which is a somewhat difficult one to cross, where you need to, through practice and effort, force your mind to combine all these things into something which is an integrated language and gives you the basis of fluent communication. I think of it as a basic matrix from which you can add more complexity. You can learn all sorts of words and phrases without having this dynamic matrix capable of rapidly generating communication in appropriate ways. Right now I’m somewhere in the midst of this threshold (and thus the headaches from the language sessions). I’m able to communicate in novel ways only with much effort, but as I make that effort I make progress and am able to integrate more of what I’ve learned.

I think it’s interesting that when I was learning French, by the time that I was beginning to form this sort of basic matrix of fluency I probably had a vocabulary of about 1000 words and had been working on the language for nearly 2 years. With Swahili, I’m reaching that point with only maybe only 2-300 words. This is not because Swahili is more simple or has a small vocabulary, just that I now have the capacity (and possibly confidence) to try to communicate at an earlier stage of vocab acquisition. Also, once you know some verb grammar, a single word verb can be conjugated to say a lot of different things.

So for the grammatically curious, I’ll write out a little Swahili grammar lesson, using one verb, a noun and an adjective or two, two tenses, one case, and two subjects.

Ok, let’s take a verb, let’s say, ‘to want’. Verbs don’t stand on their own like they do in English, they get conjugated with a whole slew of pieces of information (in fairly straightforward ways, unlike French). So every verb in itself is a verb root. For ‘to want’, this is: -taka

In the most basic conjugation of a verb, you have a subject, then the tense, then the verb root.

Let’s take two subjects, I and you. I is ni-(pronounced 'knee') and you is (conveniently) u-

Now lets take two tenses: present –na- and future –ta-
So already we can put these together to say a few things:

Ni – na – taka: ninataka I want
Ni – ta – taka: nitataka I will want
U – na – taka: unataka You want
U – ta – taka: utataka You will want

Now if we add a noun, let’s say… shoes. Ok, so in Swahili, nouns work in a class system. All human and most living nouns exist in one class. Everything else is split into several other classes. Shoes is in a class called the ‘ki/vi’ class, for a reason now to become apparent. Shoe is kiatu and shoes is viatu.

So put them together… Ninataka viatu – I want shoes.

Adjectives go after the noun, as they do in French (shoes red, not red shoes). Some adjectives just stand on their own, but just for fun lets choose one that doesn’t. Let’s talk about our new red shoes! New is -pya and red is –ekundu

To talk about new shoes, you have to make the adjective agree with the ki/vi class noun. A new shoe is kiatu kipya and new shoes are viatu vipya. Red, because it starts with a vowel, changes the prefix a little bit. Red shoe: Kiatu chekundu, red shoes are viatu vyekundu.

You gonna want some new red shoes???
Utataka viatu vyekundu vipya?!

I want a red shoe:
Ninataka kiatu chekundu

I should stop there, but as a bonus, how to say, I want ‘it’/I want ‘them’ (referring to the shoes). Real simple. You take the prefix (it’s actually the subject prefix not the noun prefix, but in the case of ki/vi, they’re the same), and you insert it between the tense and the verb root.

So to say I want it (the shoe), you say: Nina – ki – taka: Ninakitaka
and you will want them: Uta – vi – taka: Utavitaka

Hooked, want some homework? (Pete you’re the only one I expect to do this). The verb root for ‘to like’ is –penda, the infinitive form of ‘to eat’ is kula, and the adjective for ‘blue’ is –a buluu (it changes the ki/vi prefixes in the same way –ekundu does). The past verb tense is –li-. Now, how you do you say in Swahili: ‘I liked to eat blue shoes’ (NB. Infinitive verbs follow conjugated verbs in the same way they do in French).

It’s a neat language! And as you can see, it’s really extremely logical and straightforward once you learn the necessary elements.

Wako, Wacko

Neil