"Habari za nyumbani kaka ?"
Translation:How is home, brother?
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"how is home" as in "how's life back at home, bro?" or "how's your homelife going?". makes perfect sense
it means " how is it going at home?" (a question abut your family's wellbeing) and therefore the translation dosn't make sense
I mean, I would say "how's home?" to an immediate family member, especially if I was away for a period of time, so the translation makes perfect sense to me. I can see how it's a bit strange, though.
If I understand it correctly you don't only address your actual brother as "kaka" but also other guys of a rather young age.
This may be true, because "How is your brother at home" doesn't sound like a natural sentence one would ask a friend. Mother or parents, maybe. But either way, if we were given an easier sentence with similar structure, it would make sense to us all.
I'm very new to this, but I don't think that's what the translation means. I took it as asking your brother "how is home?" or "How is home, brother?" It is addressing the 'brother' with the question 'how is home?' If I'm wrong though, I would love to know.
that is what i took from the sentence and i was looking to see if i was right or not
For it to be proper English (and swahili) there should be a comma: "How is home, brother?" Otherwise it gives all these weird translations.
Yes, comma is widely used in Swahili, same way as in English. What's happening here in the Duolingo course is just bad punctuation. I've seen several sentences started without capital letter here, so it clearly needs a read-through despite they've taken a long time to release this course.
Before you start worrying about starting a sentence with a capital letter, or putting a comma or a question mark, you need to know what Duo does when he checks your answer. He removes all your punctuation, and changes all your letters to lowercase, to see if your answer matches one of his set of possible right answers. You could even have written:
hOw iS, hOmE? BROTHER!
which matches his
how is home brother
Why is "How is home, brothers" not accepted? Also, what is the difference between "ya" and "za"? It appears "ya" is singular and "za" is plural, but what is plural in this case, the houses or the news?
The news. I would say "Any news from home, brother?" which hasn't been added to the database or "What's new?" (Although that wouldn't work for translation since they included "home" which we would often not bother to mention.)
When talking to your sibling in Swahili, do you refer them as kaka/dada or can you just refer to them by their name?
you can do both. but note that that kaka & dada can be used much broader than for siblings. any male/female friend can be called kaka/dada :)
I lived in kenya for 21yrs i was taught nyumba is house, nyumbani is home. However Tanzanian swahilli is more like british english and kenyan swahilli is like american english so might be different.
What is the role of 'za'? Duolingo shows it can be translated as 'of', but it seems to mean something different in this sentence.
Well, we're learning how they speak. Also, a sentence like this would be okay in my dialect
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I think that a house has to be some kind of structure of any size, but a home is just where you live. It can be a house, a room, a cave, a car, a park bench, at tent etc. These can all be homes.
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If nyumbani is "how is home", why cant I just say "nyumbani kaka" instead of "habari za nyumbani kaka"