"How is your afternoon Rehema?"
Translation:Habari za mchana wako Rehema?
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I don't get the difference between "za" and "ya"
I the discussion the correct answer is
"Habari za mchana Rehema? "
but in the exercise with triple selection the correct answer was
"Habari ya mchana Rehema? "
And in some previous exercise when I wtote "ya" it was marked as a typo with correct "za"
("Habari *za asubuhi, dada?")
I believe za is agreement for a plural noun, and ya, for a single noun. It seems that habari in Swahili can be either plural or singular, depending perhaps (I think I read something like that in these forums somewhere) on the specific country where it is spoken.
As for your answers being 'corrected' from ya to za or vice versa, I think that is just a case of the course not yet having accepted all alternatives that it should. It's particularly annoying for these cases where it is not counted as a proper mistake, but just a typo, as it does not give you the option to report your answer as a possible alternative, and one would have to select "other" and add a bit of text explaining the situation... but it might still be worth it to help the course improve further.
Is it necessary to say "wako" in "Habari za mchana wako Rehema"?
Is it weird/unnatural to only say "Habari za mchana Rehema?" Because I thought that "Habari za mchana" was a phrase by itself.
When addressing a person, is it always necessary to add "wako"?
Where did "wako" come from? No other pattern in this lesson uses it until now. How is "habari za mchana babu?" different from "habari za mchana wako rehema?"
I don't see either word above. It just says Habari za mchana Rehema?
If you saw it with mchana wako it's because mchana is a class 3 noun, taking the verb concord u- and the possessive concord w-. The li- and l- concords are only used with class 5 nouns such as gari, jiko, jicho etc.
mti wangu = my tree
mchana wako = your afternoon (I'm not sure how idiomatic that is though)
gari langu = my car
jicho lako = your eye
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Swahili belongs to the group of Bantu languages. Bantu languages have this syntax of placing nouns before [possessive] pronouns.
Examples:
- Nyanja: Bwanji ambuya wako? (Literally: How is your grandma?)
- Swahili: Habari ya mchana wako? (Literally: How is your afternoon?)
The word wako literally means your or of yours.
Looking at the components:
- In the Nyanja example:
Bwanji simply means How's, ambuya simply means [the] grandma and wako means [of] your[s].
- In the Swahili example:
Habari ya means How is, mchana means [the] afternoon, wako means [of] your[s].
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Alexis 237541, I agree. I have to adjust. I've been learning Spanish for the last 4 years. I now have to train my brain to learn a different way because Duolingo teaches Swahili in a different manner than it teaches Spanish. In Swahili, word order is definitely different from Spanish or American. I must make a paradigm shift.
1Nzinga - Yes I laughed writing this, but in all seriousness this is my answer: "Why if all order there the components matter does the are?"
A question: whenever it's a click to write the sentence thing, if I click "Mchana," it says it differently. Why is that? Is it because 'Mchana" has two different pronunciations?
None of the words had any audio except "mchana" and he said a completely different word for it
Why is there the pronoun "wako", whereas it was not in previous sentences???