It's been a while since I spoke any serious swahili - it's over two years since my 10 day flying visit and nearly 3 years since we returned from our year in Bukoba - so this three weeks of language training was always seriously going to stretch my brain! Because I have some language skills I was put in the intermediate class. Argh!
My language class has only 4 students so plenty of individual attention and no hiding down the back of the room. Two of the other students are also AVIs who have spent time in Tanzania and the fourth class member is a German woman who has been living in Denmark and whose husband is employed at TCDC. Poor Catrin is having to translate in multiple languages in her head as well as contend with the j/y and w/v pronunciation issues of the germanic tongues!
KiSwahili is in some ways simpler than English and in some ways far more complicated.
Every letter in swahili makes the same sound every time, and every letter is pronounced, so it is easy to read aloud even without knowing the meaning. In English how do we explain to learners of our language cough, drought, ought, though and enough? We learned them as children and just have to remember because there is no fixed pattern!
In English we only have one noun class and adjectives don't change with gender (as they do in French) or when nouns are pluralised. Adverbs also only have one form. In kiswahili there are seven classes of nouns and each has its own prefixes for adjectives, possessives and relatives, and these are different for singular and plural nouns! Counting numbers can also be classed as adjectives so two could be mbili, wawili, mapili or one of several other versions depending on what is being counted! The picture below shows the chart for noun class prefixes and infixes that is in my work book. I have to check it every time so sentence construction is very slow! Conversations are currently chock full of errors! The handwritten page was part of Thursday night's homework.
On Thursday we spent an hour having conversation - kuzungumza - with a native speaker. I talked with Rukia, a member of the TCDC dance troupe. We talked about our children, travel and daily routine. On Friday I had to read my report to the class - it must have sounded as if I'd interrogated poor Rukia! Still, I was happy with the end product and I'm sure Australian taxpayers can see I'm working hard. This weekend I have still more homework to do to try to consolidate what I have learned before the next onslaught of kiswahili grammar!
Today I caught another glimpse of the tip of Mt Meru though it vanished behind the cloud again very quickly. I was walking in to Usa River township to do some shopping. I found a duka that sold kitchen stuff so I now have plates, bowls, cups, glasses and cutlery - two of each - and a pillow. I stopped at a little supermarket and bought a mossie net, some clothes pegs and toilet paper. Now I'm set to move into my apartment in a fortnight!
