"How are you?"
Translation:Hamjambo?
46 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
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Dear Duo Swahili creators - I would love it if you would put more info on the "TIPS" for this lesson. THere is so much more that we need in order to understand.
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ZahidurRah1 - It sounds like you were looking at the question version with multiple choice word buttons. The other buttons are just random words:
uko = you are (in a place)
wavulana = boys/youths
mhandisi = engineer.
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Tios is good too! Uncles/ aunts in Spanish! I could really use an uncle or Aunt to ask questions in this course!
Yeah i noticed there is no actual area to like, review the content of each lesson, you just get thrown into the question exercises and are supposed to figure it out with trial and error.... I'm only using this course to continue my learning after taking a introduction course to swahili last term so i thankfully learned the grammar structures and syntax that duo has not provided in all that clear of a format
The little kids in Kaptembwa near Naivasha Kenya shouted Habari yako to me, a tourist.
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That's a quite complex question, but I hope this helps to get an overview:
For the beginning probably it’s good to know that verb structure in Swahili is somehow built like a train: There are many wagons on the train and every wagon has it’s own slot. If possible, you can leave out some wagons, but you can never change the order.
So to build a verb basically you take the wagons for subject, tense, (object) and word stem:
SUBJ. - TENSE - (OBJ.) - STEM.
1.SG - PRESENT - (2.SG) - love
ni -na - (ku) - penda
-> nina(ku)penda = I love (you)
That’s how it works basically, but there are much more slots for other wagons in the train of Swahili verbs. (Possibly you can spot the structure somehow in the greetings, but they are so strongly conventionalized, you cannot always apply the common rules to those phrases.)
Secondly you should be aware of „concordance“. One could say there are 15 grammatical genders, but you rather talk about noun classes that categorize nouns mostly due to semantic criteria. The head of the phrase determines to which noun class you have to adapt other relating words and grammatical affixes.
Juma alikisoma kitabu.
Juma a - li -ki - soma ki-tabu
Juma 3SG- PRÄT - cl7 -read cl7-book
= Juma read a book.
Kitabu (book) is in noun class 7 (like most "things"), so the object concordant within the verb has to correlate with class 7 (-ki-).
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Habari gani is what I learned. I see it's acknowledged a couple of times. Jambo is hello! (It could be a more formal approach than mambo as someone mentioned above.)