Learn how to ask "Where?"
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| Karibuni tena kwa kipindi hiki. Welcome back to Swahilipod101.com’s, Kiswahili kwa dakika tatu. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Swahili. |
| In the last lesson, we learned how to ask the question "What" in Swahili. |
| This time, we are going to ask questions using the interrogative word "Where?". |
| In Swahili, we use the word wapi? Basically, wapi can be used to ask where something or someone is at the moment, or to ask where someone is going. |
| Let’s have a look at these using some simple examples. |
| Here’s a good question you might hear and use a lot. Let’s say you’re calling your friend and want to know where she is. What do you say? |
| Uko wapi? |
| [slowly] Uko wapi? |
| Let’s break down this question. |
| First we had- |
| uko, which is “you are”, implying presence. And wapi simply means “where”, as we have learned in previous lessons. This one was really easy to use, right? |
| Wapi is used regardless of where the person is, but to be specific about where the place is, -po, -ko, -mo would be used together with wapi. -po, -ko, -mo are useful Swahili prepositional suffixes that indicate where something is located. For instance, -po, -ko, is used to indicate general position of the person, whereas mo indicates inside position. |
| For example: Uko wapi? “Where are you?” This indicates general position. |
| So let’s look at some questions that feature wapi. |
| If you want to ask where you are going with your friends, you would just say Tunaenda wapi? |
| [slowly] Tunaenda wapi? |
| You might remember the verb -enda from lesson 17. |
| When you want to ask where someone is from, you would say |
| Umetoka wapi? |
| [slowly] Umetoka wapi? |
| As you may have already guessed, this translates as “Where are you from?” |
| We practiced this one back in lesson 11. Do you remember? |
| Now it’s time for Medina’s Insights. |
| In addition to these question words we are learning now, there is also another way to spot a question. Look out for je at the beginning of a question. Je can be used in almost any sentence to make it a simple question. |
| For example, if you want to make the statement “You drive a car” into a question, you would ask “Do you drive a car?” |
| In Swahili the statement would be Unaendesha gari. And the question would Je, unaendesha gari? Do you see how the sentence simply started with je? And everything else remained the same. It’s pretty easy, don’t you agree? |
| If you want to emphasize the word “you”, as in “is it really you who is driving the car”, you would change it to |
| Je, nini wewe kweli unayeendesha gari? |
| Or if the ultimate question is “Is it really a car that you are driving”, you would say |
| Je, kweli ni gari unaloendesha? |
| In this lesson, we learned the Swahili form of the word “Where”. It is simple since there is only one. Right? |
| Next time we will keep asking questions! We’ll be moving on to the word "When" in Swahili. Have you already guessed that it’s also short and also just one word? You’ll find out if you’re right in the next Kiswahili kwa dakika tatu lesson. |
| Kwaheri, tuonane tena! |
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