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- "How are you?"
"How are you?"
Translation:Wewe hujambo?
42 Comments
You can equally say "habari yako" to day how are you or just hujambo. I live in Tanzania and no one would say wewe hujambo.
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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.
Ive used Habari Gani and Habari Yako when in East Africa as theyre generally more used
"wewe hujambo" was not even an option. they said "wewe mzima?" ... is the correct answer . other options were > "uko wavulana?" and "mhandisi wewe" ... how come? please help
I have heard "Wewe mzima?" (~zima refers to wholeness --> health) I have not heard the others and they were not shown to me, so Idk.
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.
In Kenya (at least in Nairobi) the people never use "jambo", "sijambo" etc., only for tourists. Instead they use "mambo" a lot.
true as well in case of greeting! the singular/plural difference applies to the lexeme itself having many translations (like "matter", "condition", "fact"...)
Nivas, you could. Depending on whom you are addressing. Most of the time the greeting was just 'jambo' or' habari ya leo'. To which everyone answered 'mzuri, mzuri sana' and walked off.
I had 3 options to translate this sentence, and the closest answer was "wewe mzima," but I haven't learned mzima yet. Can someone tell me what it means please?
The other two options were uko wanaume and waafrika wewe.
The little kids in Kaptembwa near Naivasha Kenya shouted Habari yako to me, a tourist.
I think we could do with some Tios for this course. Im finding this one hard to pick up.
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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!
Habari Yako is mich better, go on YouTube, tupe how to learn Swahili, look at the one that said learn Swahili while you sleeping.they have a much updated Swahili people speak in the street.
In Tanzania i would say "mambo vipi" but that wasn't accepted. Am i wrong? Or is duolingo wrong?
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-).
