Negative sentences

If you've read through the last few posts and practised making questions and sentences, you should be able to ask a question like

Unapenda chai?     (Do you like tea?)

And reply

Ndiyo, ninapenda chai.    (Yes, I like tea.)

Everyone likes tea, so that's fine. But sometimes you need to be able to say that you don't like something - cockroaches, for example.

Sipendi mende.      I don't like cockroaches.

In the present tense, a negative sentence has no tense marker.  The present tense NA that you need in a positive verb disappears.

The person markers are also different from the positive person markers (ni, u, a, tu, m, wa).  You should recognise them from the 'jambo' greetings:

Si          I don't
Hu        You don't
Ha        He/She doesn't
Hatu     We don't
Ham     You (plural) don't
Hawa    They don't

All of them apart from 'si' add 'h' or 'ha' to the positive person marker.

The last thing to remember about negative verbs is that the 'a' at the end of the verb changes to 'i'.
Penda becomes pendi, sema becomes semi etc.  So you should have:

                                          Negative person marker + verb ending in 'i'

If you want to say that you don't like doing something, the negative verb is followed by an infinitive verb.  Infinitives begin with 'ku', e.g. kusoma, kupenda, kula.

Hatupendi buibui.                   We don't like spiders.
Hawajui kusema Kiswahili.    They don't know how to speak Swahili.
Siwezi kuona mlima.                I can't see the mountain.
Hutaki kula pweza?                 Don't you want to eat some octopus?
Hampiki chapati.                     You're not cooking chapatis (if you're speaking to several people)
Hafanyi kazi hospitalini.          She / He doesn't work at the hospital.

Exceptions

There are two groups of verbs that behave slightly differently.

1)  Foreign verbs

If a verb doesn't end in 'a', then it was originally a foreign word (usually Arabic).  Examples of these include ishi (live) and fahamu (understand).  These words do not change their final letter in the negative.

Ninafahamu  -   Sifahamu
Unaishi         -    Huishi

2)  Short verbs

A small group of Swahili verbs are known as 'short verbs', because they are too short to stand alone without their infinitive 'ku'.  There aren't very many of these verbs, but most of them are very common.  They include:

kula       - to eat
kunywa - to drink
kuja       - to come
kwenda  - to go

A normal verb like kupenda (to like) drops its infinitive 'ku' in a normal sentence.  These short verbs retain the 'ku'; you say "ninakula" (I eat), not "ninala".

In a negative sentence, however, short verbs lose the 'ku' prefix.

So KULA becomes LA.

Then, because the 'a' changes to 'i' in a negative verb, LA becomes LI.  All you're left with is the negative prefix plus 'li':

Sili nyama       I don't eat meat
Huli ndizi        You don't eat bananas
Hali samaki     He / She doesn't eat fish

These require a bit more practice, since 'sili' no longer looks much like 'kula'.

Unakwenda sokoni?    Siendi sokoni, ninakwenda nyumbani.
Are you going to the market?     I'm not going to the market, I'm going home.

Mnakunywa kahawa?   Hatunywi kahawa, tunakunywa chai.
Are you drinking coffee?  We're not drinking coffee, we're drinking tea.

Wanakuja mjini?  Hawaji mjini, wanafanya kazi leo.
Are they coming to town?   They're not coming to town, they're working today.