Learn some simple tricks to learn grammar
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| INTRODUCTION |
| Medina: Hi everyone, Medina here. |
| Joshua: Hi, everyone! I’m Joshua, and welcome back to SwahiliPod101.com. This is All About Lesson 3, Painless Swahili Grammar. |
| Medina: Oh no, not grammar! |
| Joshua: I'm sure some of our listeners are having the same reaction right about now. But, we're here to tell you – there's nothing to worry about! |
| Medina: That's right! We've made Swahili grammar so simple that you'll wonder what the fuss was all about. |
| Joshua: You'll be surprised to learn that compared to English, Swahili grammar is amazingly easy. It’s not the kind you need to spend hours and hours memorizing. In fact, you could master the basics in less than a week! |
| Medina: Less than a week? Well, we'll see about that. |
| Joshua: Just trust me. It's nowhere near as hard as your college professor makes it seem. |
Lesson focus |
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| Medina: Well, the basic word order is certainly similar to English. |
| Joshua: But some of the more difficult aspects of Swahili grammar can't be easily summed up. You need complicated grammar explanations to understand how it all works, right Medina? |
| Medina: Not quite. All you need is agreement - agreement. |
| Joshua: Grammatical agreement means that all the pieces and parts of a sentence need to agree with or match everything else. But we'll talk more about this later because we're getting off topic. |
| Medina: So here’s a quick grammar overview. Now, grammar has its place, but in these All About lessons we are going to avoid all but the most basic grammatical terms. |
| Joshua: That’s right. Introducing unfamiliar grammatical concepts in the early stages of language learning actually makes things much more difficult than they need to be. We’ll start by talking about verbs, which as you know, indicate action. |
| Medina: All languages have verbs, which makes learning them an important place to start. |
| Joshua: But every language uses those verbs differently, which means that they need special attention. Swahili verbs act almost exactly the same as English verbs, so if you know the English basics then there's nothing to worry about. |
| Medina: That means...less vocabulary to learn! |
| Joshua: That’s right! Swahili verbs contain one central meaning - time, also called tense. |
| Medina: The tense is past, present, or future. |
| Joshua: That's it? No other meanings are needed?! |
| Medina: Only time. The meaning is expressed by conjugating the verbs. |
| Joshua: Yes. Conjugating verbs is a way of making the verbs agree or match what you are talking about. |
| Medina: And time is indicated by changing the verb to a past, present, or future form. |
| Joshua: English verbs change, or conjugate, too. The difference is that English verbs change according to different conjugation patterns. |
| Medina: That's right. For example, time can be expressed as "I was happy", past tense, which is different from "I am happy", present tense, which is different from "I will be happy", future tense. |
| Joshua: Exactly. In English they also the person, like "I am happy" which is different from "He is happy," which is different from "We are happy." |
| Medina: And this is not at all necessary for verbs in Swahili! Hmm. We went through that pretty fast didn't we!? But don't worry about the details right now. We’ll just go for the big picture. |
| Joshua: Right. Swahili verbs are conjugated according to patterns that are slightly different than English. They have the same or slightly more meaning in them than English verbs do. |
| Medina: For example, a response to ‘Unawasili hivi karibuni?’, meaning "Are you arriving soon?" is ‘Naja.’ which means, "I am coming." |
| Joshua: In Swahili just as in English, the present tense "am" is needed to make a sentence. There are, also, lots of interesting and simple ways you can use verbs in Swahili. |
| Medina: You’ll learn many of these in our lessons. But now, we need to talk a bit about grammatical gender. |
| Joshua: Compared to other languages, there is no gender in Swahili, which is good news. Nouns are neither masculine nor feminine - they might be all considered "neuter". |
| Medina: The last thing we should talk about is plurality. |
| Joshua: Once again, this is a form of agreement among words. |
| Medina: Right. We already learned that verbs need to be altered or conjugated to the correct tense. |
| Joshua: Which English does too. |
| Medina: Yes. Swahili extends plurality to nouns and articles. |
| Joshua: Whereas in English, the plural is formed by adding “s” to the singular. In Swahili, the formation of plural nouns and adjectives depends on the noun class. |
Outro |
| Medina: Okay. I guess that's enough for today. |
| Joshua: We hope this has prepared you more for your journey into Swahili. |
| Medina: Hopefully after this, there will be no major surprises! |
| Joshua: Make sure you check the lesson notes, and we’ll see you next time! |
| Medina: Thanks everyone, bye! |
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