Kuuliza si ujinga

I've been trying to teach myself some Swahili before I go to Africa. So far, I really like the language. It's very rhythmical. To say, "No sir," you use a rhyming phrase: "Hapana bwana." The stress is always on the before-last syllable (more predictable than English!) and the pronunciation is similar to Spanish in many ways.

Some of the more interesting aspects of the language:

-there are somewhere between six and eight classes of nouns. Where Spanish has two classes (male and female), Swahili has a class for words relating to people, a class for words relating to abstract ideas, and so on. Often you can identify a noun's class by it's first letter--words in the class of nouns relating to people all begin with m or mw, for example.

-to pluralize a word, you change the beginning of the word instead of adding something to the end. Mtoto (child) becomes watoto (children). Kitabu (book) becomes vitabu (books). The nature of the change depends on the noun's class.

-as far as I can tell, there are no genders. There's a single word that means both he and she, and a single word that means both son and daughter.

-As Disney tells us, Hakuna matata really means no worries. Also, Simba means lion and Rafiki means friend.