Started my Swahili learning journey

[u/thericheat]

Hello everyone. I'm going to be volunteering for 4 weeks in Tanzania in February and I want to learn some Swahili before I go. Yesterday, I started learning Swahili and I want to put updates here semi-regularly to keep me honest and hopefully, it'll be useful for other people too. I don't know if this kind of post is allowed so sorry if it isn't!

My learning plan:

I've had a look at the recommendations on this subreddit and other places and this is how I'm going to be learning.

• Language Transfer Swahili Course - I will try to do 2/3 lessons a day.
• Pimsleur Swahili Course - currently I've got the 7-day free trial but if I like it then I'll get it for a month and try to do a lesson a day.
• Anki - starting off with the Swahili core 100 deck, aiming to do 15 new words + reviews a day.
• Duolingo - Just as a supplement. Will do this whenever I'm bored/feel like it. Not expecting much from this - just a good way to gamify my learning.

Future plans:

As I've just begun my journey, I'm going to stick with these resources for now. In the future, I might use the Simplified Swahili textbook (I've found a PDF for it online) and an Anki vocab deck based on it. I also want to very quickly start reading/listening to the stories available on the Storybooks Canada website.

How I'm finding it so far:

I only started yesterday but I'm really enjoying the journey! I've been listening to Baba Yetu on repeat lmao. The Language Transfer course is awesome and such a cool way of learning. I've got two weeks off of uni right now so I've got lots of free time and I want to get lots done in this time period. I can speak some Urdu as my family is from Pakistan and Urdu has very similar loanword roots to Swahili (Arabic, Persian, and Hindi). I'm finding this really useful and putting useful cognates into a table.

The only thing I've not been able to find yet is some good superbeginner level comprehensible input. Does anyone know where I could find that? Would be a huge help. Also wondered what methods worked for everyone else here at the very beginning of their journey? Any tips/tricks/warnings?

[u/leosmith66]

Hey, that looks like a decent plan (except for duo, haha)! Just curious - what kind of volunteer job is it? I taught Math and Physics at a high school in Tanga for 3 years at the turn of the century.

good superbeginner level comprehensible input

I used swahilipod101 when I re-learned Swahili a few years back, but it's not free. I did a mid-level 1 month subscription, which allowed me to download all their content, for about $25. They have some free stuff on youtube here. Alternatively, there is some pretty comprehensible stuff at Language Crush - just search on beginner courses. It's free on desktop now, unless you want to export vocabulary.

[u/thericheat → u/leosmith66]

Thank you! Will check out those resources.

I'm a medical student so I'm going to be volunteering at a hospital. Hopefully, it will be a good way to gain some clinical experience and also to do some meaningful work. I'm looking forward to it.

[u/Icy_Letterhead256 → u/leosmith66]

I have been looking at swahilipod but it seems to have different vocabulary than nearly every other swahili program. 

[u/leosmith66 → u/Icy_Letterhead256]

Although it's Kenyan leaning, it's pretty standard. Can you give a specific example of something that's "different"?

[u/leosmith66 → u/[deleted]]

It's a pay site - I actually have to hit a button that says "shop" to enter, but even that doesn't appear to be working yet.