This is another spin-off of my main log, and this time, it is dedicated to Swahili, one of my most favorite languages.
This log is about someone's personal learning progress (aiming to reach intermediate level at least), and about Surface Level Swahili. There also is another thread that could be of additional interest to some of you. I opened that other thread for those who would have something on their minds about what I am writing in this log, while what they would like to say is in-depth, rather detailed and beyond Surface Level Swahili. As for anything else anyone would like to say about what I wrote in this log, they of course simply could reply here, rather than going to another thread.
Swahili topics that are too in-depth for SGP's Beyond Beginner's Swahili Log
For those who are curious whether myself spending some time on this language interferes with spending some time on another one, like Japanese: no, it doesn't do so at all, as surprising as it may seem. This is because I am learning them in rotation anyway. In addition, I have got a certain amount of Japanese energy, and a certain amount of Swahili energy. They aren't really related to each other. It is a different story with Spanish and French for some reasons, but even for those two, I give both of them a certain amount of my totally available time, so to say.
Also, I am mentally interlinking Japanese and Swahili, because they have got more in common than it seems. Both are agglutinative languages, which means that words in both of them can be rather long because they consist of several Word Building Blocks.
In this log, I plan to post any (big or small) Swahili-related progress. At the time I am opening this thread, I already speak some basic Swahili (which means in this context: it is among the languages that I am not only able to read and write). I was also already able to advance much more with it than with Japanese, which means that in the case of Kiswahili (as you call it in Swahili itself, "ki-" means something like "language of"), I already am closer to post-beginner's level. And now it may be the time to go towards the goal of reaching the intermediate level at least.
That was a warm-up.
Now starting by reviewing something I already read in the past:
- The difference between "open" and "close" is a single letter only.
funga mlango: close the door (you, singlar)
fungua mlango: open the door (you, singular)
So "-funga" is the verb stem of "to close". And this "-a-" suffix reverses the meaning.
- "njoo" is one of the few irregular imperative verbs I ever have read about. It means "come" (you, singular). The stem for "to come" is "-kuja". If anybody of you knows why this rare irregularity occured, I'd be interested in hearing it.
- One of the things I didn't really learn much about yet are Swahili's noun classes. There is no grammatical gender like "el" and "la" in Spanish. But there is a number of noun classes (exactly/approximately ten). They are all about a number of changes to both the nouns themselves and other words surrounding them, like adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and also verbs even. But it really is a rather simple thing, it's just not something that can be learned overnight.