So, after completing the fifteen page introduction to the Swahili course I am – as the title suggests – cross-eyed but happy. I don’t have a lot to report except that tonight my dreams will probably be full of words and phrases like: “affrication” or “voiced labio-dental fricatives” or “apico-alveolar flap”. Sigh. I’m glad that’s not the language I’m learning right now!
Knowing that finishing the lesson out on notes such as those would not be great incentive to sit back down to the work tomorrow, I took a peek at the dialog in Unit 1. No surprise, it consists of a few common greetings. The happy surprise was that as I read through the greetings, some of them were familiar, words that I had heard over and over again while in Kenya. And with those familiar words came to my mind many happy, familiar, smiling Kenyan faces. Here are some of them:
