"Have a good afternoon Esther"

Translation: Mchana mwema Esther

[yebyps]

"mchana" is afternoon and "siku" is day. I don't see why it's wrong to exclude "siku" as a possibility for translating "afternoon".

[RudolfJan]

In the mulpiple choice question, you should now give both answers as a correct translation, so possibly you are correct. Saying Good afternoon seems to me a bit unnatural in English, though it is very common in Dutch. The Dutch word voor good afernoon is "goede middag" which is shorter to say I guess.

[juryrigging]

Good afternoon seems unnatural to you in English? It really isn't.

[Joel158879]

As a greeting, "good afternoon" is not unnatural. But "Mchana mwema" is not really a greeting. As in you don't lead off with it in a conversation. It's more for at the end of a conversation when you would say like "ok, well have a good afternoon" in which case saying "good afternoon" (by itself) would be unnatural.

[LobsangC]

Yes. We say it all the time -I am a native US English speaker and taught English in grammar school, tutored it in college. Guten Abend, Buenos tardes! Good afternoon children!, Good afternoon Il Profesori (I may have spelled that last a letter or two off.

[cpmad]

I agree, we say it frequently.
By the way, the Spanish is "buenas tardes", because tardes is feminine. You have an impressive array of languages in your comment! :)

[Julianfshpearson]

Good afternoon sounds perfectly natural to me as a native English speaker.

[Julianfshpearson]

There is nothing whatsoever about saying good afternoon in English, good day is rarer and is often associated with Australians.

[iTyrion]

So what's the difference between mwema and njema?

[Dalaryn]

The noun classes they represent, the root word is -ema for both.

[AidanMeach]

Which noun class is which? How do you distinguish?

[Dalaryn]

siku is the 'n' noun class, mchana is the 'm-mi' class. I'm not great on these, but this is a good reference: http://www2.ku.edu/~kiswahili/pdfs/lesson_09.pdf

[PhilRushton]

There's a problem with the audio on 'Mchana'

[Ben_Stallings]

I agree, it sounds like "meowsima."

[JayDavid5]

When choosing "mchana" I always hear "mzima". Anyone else have this problem?

[kathrynlanguage]

What class makes njema start wity nj?

[Joel158879]

it's commonly referred to as the n/n noun class.

[Estrella513939]

Hello, I didn't get how do we know if we have to use "mwema"/"mjema"/"njema"

[RudolfJan]

You will learn more about this later in the course. It depends on the noun class. e.g. siku is in the N/N noun class and then you need to use njema, fas well as for asubuhi and jioni. You need mwema for mchana and usiku. You just need to learn the noun class for each word. The bad news is that in this course noun classes are not explicitly mentioned, so you will be regularly surprised by the actual noun class. Noun classes are important in Swahili, almost everything depends on it, so be prepared for a lot of confusion.