Colloquial Swahili: The Complete Course for Beginners

by Donovan McGrath, Lutz Marten

Colloquial Swahili is easy to use and completely up to date! Specially written by experienced teachers for self-study or class use, the course offers you a step-by-step approach to written and spoken Swahili. No prior knowledge of the language is required. What makes Colloquial Swahili your best choice in personal language learning? By the end of this rewarding course you will be able to communicate confidently and effectively in Swahili in a broad range of everyday situations.

Genres: Language

312 pages, Paperback

First published May 12, 2002

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I used this book for self-study. I really liked the course. The topics it covered in grammar and culture were well selected, well structured and well paced. The complementary audio was excellent. The dialogues in particular were wonderful. They seemed to depict authentic situations, and very cleverly and invisibly built on one another, so you gradually learnt new vocabulary and grammar. The exercises were well pitched, and I was able to work through the whole book in a bit more than a month. I really noticed an improvement in my Swahili, and I was able to understand the complex texts at the end of the more better than I could understand the simpler texts at the start.

There were a couple of little issues with the book when used for self-study. Perhaps they would disappear if the book were used as a course textbook instead. First were the grammar explanations. The back of the books says they are “concise,” and concise they are indeed! I had already done the Language Transfer Swahili course, so was familiar with most of the structures already. I’ve also learnt several languages before. If it hadn’t been for these two facts, I doubt I could have understood the grammar explanations easily.

The second issue was with the glossaries. There were often words in the dialogues, readings and exercises that were not glossed in the chapter, and sometimes the gloss did not even appear in the glossary at the end. This was not a major issue really, since Google Translate now functions pretty well as a comprehensive Swahili-English dictionary. But it was a little tedious sometimes to have to flick back and forth. Sometimes in the “readings”, too, there were grammatical constructions that had not yet been introduced. But this appears to have been deliberate, and I suppose it did make me curious about how certain things worked.

There was also a tiny little issue with the audio materials—there were several additional exercises in the audio which were not noted in the text of the book. This was really quite a minor problem.

Overall, I would highly recommend this course to anyone hoping to learn Swahili. It is hard to be specific about the good points of the book. The main evidence for me is that I can read, speak and understand Swahili much better now than I could before. So...

Kwa nini unasubiri? Ujaribu kusoma Kiswahili leo!

[Shanti Hofshi]

A good introduction to Swahili with useful exercises and answers in the back. The biggest problem is that many of the words used in the dialogs and reading passages are not included in the glossary at the end. Also, it would be useful to have a little more reference material (e.g. a table of concords).