Taking on a New Language

At the beginning of this year, I was reflecting on where I wanted to go with language learning. I decided I didn't want to take on any new languages and I wanted to focus on the ones I've already started. That's not at all how this year turned out.

At the end of 2014, I started teaching myself Italian. In January, I started a German course. And now this September I started a Swahili course. So much for not starting any new languages.

Now that I've started Swahili, though, I am really enjoying myself. I'm starting to think that maybe taking on one major language per continent is also not a bad strategy!

The course I'm taking is actually the first undergraduate Swahili course the University of Edinburgh has ever put on, and it seems to be going really well. I like the way the class is structured for the most part and I'm really happy with how I'm progressing, so I thought I'd talk a little more in depth about my progress and my opinions of the class.

One thing I think is really unique about this course is that the textbook was created by our teacher specifically for this course. It hasn't been published and hopefully it will be in the next year or two. It means there are some typos and mistakes, but it also means there isn't any unnecessary material or weird vocabulary we won't be using. I think it has a few things missing, which I've talked about with the teacher, but overall I think it's fantastic. It also only cost 8 pounds because all we had to pay for was the cost of printing! Also, it's worth noting that the name of the textbook is a play on the name of Swahili in Swahili (Kiswahili).

Like I said, the way the class is structured is really nice. We have one 2-hour lecture, one tutorial, and one conversation class. In the 2-hour lecture, we go over grammar and vocabulary and then do written exercises to apply what we've learned. We also get homework after each lecture, which so far has been the exercises from the workbook. We have an teacher from England who teaches us the grammar, which is great, because he understands what it's like to learn Swahili as a second language.

Our tutorials involve pretty much the same goals, but with more group and spoken activities, since the groups in tutorials are a lot smaller.

Our conversation class is even smaller and is mostly about bringing together everything we've learned that week and has a focus on speaking. Our teacher for the conversation classes is a native speaker and he also has been inviting another native speaker or advanced student to come in and help.

Having said all that, I do have a few ideas how the course could be improved.

Probably the most stressful thing about this course is learning all of the vocabulary. There are practically no cognates for me, so I'm pretty much starting from scratch. The way the course has dealt with vocabulary has not been stellar, because for the most part we've learned words out of context, that is from lists in our textbook or in lectures. This makes it incredibly hard for the brain to absorb the words and to internalize the meanings. I've been coping by putting the vocabulary all on Memrise and reviewing the vocabulary until I feel comfortable with it.

According to Memrise, I've learned about 200 words and phrases in the past 2 weeks, which is a rate of absorption that is not maintainable. I mean I haven't even fully learned all those words and phrases, so I think the pace of vocabulary learning is a bit unrealistic, since we're basically expected to memorize the vocabulary rather than learning the vocabulary in a more natural way. If they introduced new words by giving us a sentence with only one or two unknown words, it would be much better for learning, since the words would be associated with the context in which they were presented.

If the course were to include dialogues in the textbook, which we could read - and even more ideally listen to - I think we would get a better feel for how words and phrases fit together, for the way the language sounds, and better listening comprehension skills. My Chinese textbook has two dialogues in each chapter, which have videos on YouTube of the dialogues being acted out, which I find to be very helpful, because the situation becomes a lot more memorable and there are a lot more senses that can contribute to the memory of the word, as opposed to just seeing it written on paper. I think this is a really effective aspect of the way I am being taught Chinese, and I think it could apply to learning many different languages.

I also wish there were more contact hours and/or that they were more spread out. The 2-hour lecture should probably be 2 or 3 1-hour lectures, because it would work better if I had Swahili class every day of the week. Having contact only 3 hours a week really makes a difference in the amount of progress I'm making. Daily and steady exposure is pretty much the only way to go with language learning, in my opinion. Irregular and larger chunks of language learning are a lot less effective and involve intense learning periods and a lot of forgetting between chunks, whereas steady learning is constant and a lot less stressful.

I have done a pretty good job of creating a system, where I review my notes after classes, put all new vocabulary into Memrise, and then review the flashcard decks until I have learned the vocabulary. This is how I cope with having Swahili classes only 3 days a week.

Now, that's enough complaining. I am really enjoying Swahili. There are some cool sounds and some cool grammatical features, which are new to me. I am not used to really encoding much in prefixes, but a lot of information is in the prefixes in Swahili. For instance, the structure for conjugating verbs is subject marker + tense marker + verb stem. So in the word ninakwenda, ni- means I, -na- tells you the verb is in the present tense, and -kwenda means to go. It's pretty much the opposite of Spanish. In Spanish the structure is verb stem + tense marker + person marker. It just changes the order in which you have to formulate your words and sentences, which is a fun exercise.

I feel like there's a lot of really complex grammar they're hiding until later, and I'm really hoping we get to some of it soon, because that's the best part!

I hope to continue to update my progress in and impressions about Swahili as I continue to study it, because it's been a really fun language so far.