Colloquial Swahili: The Complete Course for Beginners

Welcome to Colloquial Swahili! We hope you will enjoy working with this book and its audio material, and that they will help you to feel comfortable and happy to use Swahili – Kiswahili in Swahili – in a number of everyday situations. In order to make the most of the information offered in this course, you should know how it is structured. The course consists of fourteen units, and each unit is based on three dialogues. The dialogues are the heart of each unit. They describe situations and aspects of East African life from different points of view, and introduce the vocabulary and structures needed to talk about them. At the beginning of each unit, the main points of the unit are summarized. On the audio material you will find the dialogues spoken by Swahili speakers, and the best way to understand natural Swahili and to produce a reasonable copy of it yourself is to listen to the dialogues a number of times. For the first half of the course, up to Unit 7, the dialogues are translated into English. The English translations of the dialogues are meant to help you to understand both the content of the Swahili dialogue and its structure. They may sound strange to the English speaker at times, as we have tried to reveal as much as possible of the structure of the original, and because some Swahili expressions just don’t translate very well into English. After Unit 7, you will no longer need translations, as you will easily understand the Swahili dialogues with the help of the vocabulary listed after each dialogue.