How to learn Swahili (part one): Relax

If you have a tendency to be a bit pedantic about spelling and grammar, learning Swahili might help you loosen up a bit. I speak from experience.  As someone who learns languages more easily through reading than through listening, I find it hard to remember a word unless I’ve seen it written down. Until I feel confident about how to spell it, it hovers at the edge of my memory and threatens to disappear at any moment; if I realise I’ve been spelling it incorrectly, I have to start chasing it all over again until I can pin it down and make sure that it’s fixed in my head, each letter in its proper place. Perhaps this is a symptom of growing up in English, a language in which spelling is either right or wrong, and can be mysteriously different from the way a word is pronounced.

Swahili is kinder and more flexible.  Some people write “asante”, others prefer “ahsante” (thank you) but neither is ‘wrong’ – they both sound the same, if you say them out loud. The same goes for the expression for ‘let’s go’, which can be written “twende” or “tuende”.  In some parts of Tanzania ‘l’ and ‘r’ are interchangeable, so you might see “tayari” (ready / already) written as “tayali” if that’s how the word is pronounced. No one seems to think that the question of ‘correct’ spelling merits any kind of strong opinion.

Up to a point, the same goes for grammar and pronunciation. The standard Swahili that you learn in books or in class is based on the Swahili spoken in Zanzibar. The further you get from the coast, the more differences you hear in the way Swahili is spoken; for most Tanzanians it isn’t their first language anyway, so the way they speak it depends on the level of education they’ve had and the area they come from.  Everyone is used to hearing Swahili spoken with a wide variety of accents, often with some variations from standard grammar, sometimes incorporating words from other languages in ways that are changing every day (an extreme example is Sheng, an urban Swahili-based slang spoken in Nairobi which incorporates a lot of words from English and from other Kenyan languages).  So if you know that your pronunciation isn’t perfect and you’re worried about making grammatical mistakes, relax – as long as people can understand you, the rest doesn't matter that much.