My departure plans have been finalized. I will be flying out of Sea-Tac at 6:00 am on June 22nd, and arriving in Dar es Salaam a couple days later at 3:45 am on June 24th. The rest of the WorldTeach Tanzania volunteers won’t be arriving until August 14th, but, since it made a lot more sense financially to travel independently, I opted to arrive early. I think I will spend those few weeks in and around Dar taking language classes and exploring a bit.<\/p>\n
I have found it very difficult to study Swahli\u00a0independently. While I have\u00a0acquired\u00a0some excellent resources, and am beginning to learn some\u00a0vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar structure, it is very difficult to retain it without using it on a regular basis. This is something I will have to remember when I am teaching students English later this year.<\/p>\n
Despite my difficulties remembering\u00a0vocabulary, I have found myself particularly interested in the actual linguistic structure of Swahili. Like other Bantu languages, nouns are grouped in classes with specific prefixes for noting singular or plural nouns. These classes also seem to correlate to the type of noun as well. For instance, the M-WA class is mainly comprised of words for people. Nouns that start with m- in this class are singular, while words that start with wa- are plural. or instance, mtu means “a person,” while watu means “people.” Nouns are then modified with adjectives by attaching the same prefix to the word. For instance, I could use the adjective -dogo (small) to modify mtu by adding a m, like so: “mtu mdogo” (small person). I am pretty sure there are 18 noun classes total.<\/p>\n
I would like to be reasonably proficient in Swahili by the time I am done, so there’s a lot of language learning left to be done!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My departure plans have been finalized. I will be flying out of Sea-Tac at 6:00 am on June 22nd, and arriving in Dar es Salaam a couple days later at 3:45 am on June 24th. The rest of the WorldTeach … Continue reading