Swali? - La!

Being in a foreign country also entails learning the language as it is always nice to be able to now and then add one or two words in the foreign language to the discussion – believe us, it makes you even more popular if you know how to swear and especially if you are able to swear without knowing. One day Jannik entered the office and was asked by the staff to revise any vocabulary he has learned the previous day in Kiswahili. He gave it a quick thought, trying hard to remember any of the numbers and blurted out: Kuma. Well, let us say that “kumi” would have been a number, namely 10, but “kuma” – Let’s better keep that to ourselves. With that in mind, we were very excited and not scared at all to learn Kiswahili ourselves.

If we should describe the language in one sentence: It is a combination of The Lion King and baby language; Simba actually exists and means Lion – yes, we just figured that out - and Baba, kaka and dada are all members of the family. The family vocabulary was one of our first lessons named “Familia ya nyuklia – Nuclear family”. Here we realized that we not only had a lack of Kiswahili knowledge, but especially didn’t master the English language yet as we were rather thinking of the Third World War than immediate family members. Nevertheless, we are eager to study hard for our test on Friday and in general curious about all the upcoming surprises the language holds. If we might ever get bored with Kiswahili, there are a couple of tribe languages we still can try out.

Jannik studying hard