Has anyone dabbled in Kinyarwanda/Kirundi here? What resources did you use? How far did you get? What tips can you offer a potential learner?
Murakóze.

Set wrote:It's not that surprising. There's a massive lack of interest in Sub-Saharan Africa here. Other than a little interest in the most "obscure" or linguistically interesting languages, it's pretty euro-centric.
I'm interested in looking at more Bantu languages now that I have some grasp on Swahili. The only problem is that I don't like tones, but yeh I'd be interested in comparing Bantu languages.
Do you have any links?
Trebor wrote:The apparent lack of interest on UniLang is quite understandable in light of the mind-boggling difficulty of this Bantu supra-language.
Set wrote:It's not that surprising. There's a massive lack of interest in Sub-Saharan Africa here. Other than a little interest in the most "obscure" or linguistically interesting languages, it's pretty euro-centric.
I'm interested in looking at more Bantu languages now that I have some grasp on Swahili. The only problem is that I don't like tones, but yeh I'd be interested in comparing Bantu languages.
Do you have any links?
Set wrote:Looking at the Kimenyi text, it's interesting to see how some of the vocabulary resembles Swahili-Arabic vocabulary. I thought that with Rwanda and Burundi being further away from the coast, their language wouldn't have so much obvious influence from Arabic. The next question is whether this influence came directly from Arab traders or whether it's come from Swahili.
Some examples:
Kinyarwanda / Swahili
igitabo / kitabu
ikáramú / karamu
ibáruwá / barua
umwáarimú / mwalimu
Trebor wrote:Great. Tone can be a pain. To make matters worse, Kinyarwanda/Kirundi uses this feature for not only lexical but also grammatical purposes.
johnklepac wrote:Wow, I like that.
eddeux wrote:Kinyarwanda/Kirundi has also interested me alongside Swahili, Luganda, Yoruba & Hausa. I occasionally go to Rwandan sites like Igihe or VOA & BBC's Kinyarwandan site just to see the language. It looks difficult but I'd certainly be up for the challenge if there were just more resources.
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