Swahili is kind of difficult

Note: this was supposed to be posted several days ago, but our internet connection died, and I've edited it in spots since then, so in some places "yesterday" means yesterday and in some places it means last week. Sorry. 

Every weekday morning from 9 to 12, we have Swahili class with Richard, our teacher. We meet alongside a secondary school in a Catholic church in Posta, or central Dar es Salaam. The whole secondary school has about fifty kids and maybe half a dozen teachers, and everyone meets in one large room. Each class sits around a whiteboard, and the teachers rotate. We have a whiteboard too, although our teacher stays where he is. Sometimes we glance over at other groups to discover they are learning about algebra, hydrogen chemistry, or the symptoms and transmission of syphilis. (I think that was yesterday.) It's a very different environment than we're used to for school.

Our class is intense. It's just the four of us (Tim is here now), and I've never been in a language class that moved so quickly. I got here speaking almost no Swahili, and I can now put together sentences like, "Do you have the key to my room?" That doesn't mean I can always make myself understood–the words come slowly and my pronunciation is shaky–but I'm amazed at how rapidly we're all progressing. We're much, much better than we were a little while ago. And we've started to almost automatically refer to certain nouns, particularly food, by their Swahili names. So if you ask us what we had for dinner, we might say we had ndizi, nyama, and wali.

That said, we do still make some interesting mistakes. (See Bree's entry for today.) I think we sound pretty demented on a regular basis—I’m reminded of David Sedaris, who has described trying to buy calves’ brains in French and ending up saying, “Is thems the thoughts of cows?” It's easy to make mistakes in Swahili, actually, because of the way the language is structured. It's a regular language with few exceptions, so once you learn the rules, you're okay. However, there are a lot of rules to learn. There are about eight classes of nouns, like declensions in Latin, and while the nouns themselves don't change, everything else has to agree with them. And when I say everything, I mean the adjectives, the demonstrative pronouns, and even the verbs, which must agree with the class, person, and number of the subject as well as occasionally agreeing with the direct object. You wind up with a lot of alliteration. (“My books are bad” in Swahili is “Vitabu vyangu ni vibaya.”)

All the agreements mean that when you're starting to learn the language, as we are, you're likely to misuse words all the time. For example, one of the first words we learned was "nzuri," which means "good." If someone asks you how you're doing, you say "Nzuri." So for a while, we figured that we could say things like, "Chakula ni nzuri," when we meant, "The food is good." Unforunately, that's not how you say that. Chakula is in a different class than a person is, and so we should really have been saying "Chakula ni kizuri." It's not the biggest mistake in the world, but I'm pretty sure it made it even more difficult for people to understand us when we tried to talk. And of course, we make some simple vocabulary mistakes. The other day, I told the people who had us over for lunch that their books were delicious, and Bree, trying to say she was tired, accidentally told our teacher that she was hateful.

Swahili is also different from other languages I've learned in that everything goes on the front of the verb. If you wanted to say, "I taught myself," you would say "Nilijifundisha," in which "ni" indicates that the subject is "I," "li" shows that it's past tense, "ji" makes it reflexive, and "fundisha" is the stem of the verb meaning to teach. This isn't exactly hard, but it takes some getting used to. I think verbs are actually our strong suit–we can make positive and negative statements in four or so tenses, and we can also form imperatives and what I think are called hortatory forms (as in, "Let's go"). I'm very impressed by us. I won’t speak for the others, but for me, I don’t feel like I understand Swahili as a language yet. It’s more like a code that I can sometimes decipher. But it gets easier every day. 

On a more personal note: I moved out of Mikocheni B and into the homestay house a couple of nights ago. I think we're going to switch off staying there, although I'm not sure when. The water seems to work more regularly than at Inno's, where there have been some problems, and I have my own space in a sort of small guest house across the yard from the main house. It's not bad at all–the biggest drawback is that there were cockroaches in the bathroom. I sprayed them with Raid and I think they're all gone now. It's different in other ways. There's satellite TV, and I wound up watching part of The Italian Job with the host family. The family watches Nigerian movies, which deserve their own blog, and we also wound up watching Girls of the Playboy Mansion on E!. Monica and her family asked me if the show was supposed to be real. (For those not familiar with the show, it's a reality show about Hugh Hefner's girlfriends.) I also think that the cook is a bit more adventurous than Mary is, since she's cooking for real Tanzanians. I'm not sure exactly what was in the stew we had last night, but I think I saw intestines. (I ate around that part.) I like Monica and her family very much, and I'm having a nice time, although I miss everyone back at Inno's.

Bree seems to be updating everyone on her reading, so I'll do the same: I finished Beloved, which I thought was good but probably not the greatest book of the last 25 years, as well as both Rabbit Redux and Rabbit is Rich. I liked Rabbit is Rich best; actually, it’s my favorite of John Updike’s books that I’ve read so far. I think I need to read the fourth book in the series now.

Kwa herini and keep calling and e-mailing!

~Caitlin