"The news is good"
Translation:Habari ni nzuri
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No expert but - I believe, Habari means information. So 'how are you?' You are asking, 'any information about you?' So information is also used as news.
The way I've been understanding it, "habari" means "news," and the literal translation, for example, of "Habari za leo" is "News of the day." But because it's a greeting in Swahili, the closest natural English translation that gets the correct meaning across is "How is the day?" I learned this by paying attention to the comment sections as I go through the lessons.
Duolingo teaches that Habari is "how are you?" without mentioning it's literal meaning. Then the same word is used to mean news. When you're told it's one thing and then it's used in a way that is seemingly totally unrelated people get confused.
Of course, it's not totally unrelated but it seems so when learning by nothing other than having sentences thrown at you without explanation. It's why Duolingo isn't a full language learning resource by itself. It's good for practice, not so much for learning from scratch.
To be fair, the popular languages, and therefore more resources, have appropriate explanations in Duolingo. This is only my presumption based on the Spanish lessons here... And i feel Spanish doesnt even need much explanation for an English speaker (latin roots), compared to Swahili any way.
So using habari as a greeting is just a polite way of being nosey.
Is this a different class of nouns? I guess it will be taught in a later lesson...
1425
Habari is an n class noun indeed so (m)zuri turns to nzuri. It will come up later in the course...
To quote a comment that helped me a bit: "The two words are just different conjugations of the adjectives -zuri and -ema [As in mwema/njema], when they are used to refer to words from different 'ngeli' (noun categories)."
I don't fully understand yet, but this was enough to get me going in the meantime Quote from here: https://hinative.com/en-US/questions/10632115