Postscript

…nne, tano, sita, saba, nane, tisa, kumi — counting from one to ten in Kiswahili, one of the major languages in Kenya and other parts of east Africa. We’re doing more language and culture learning. About a year ago we completed a general cross-cultural course. Now, we’re doing some more specific study on our own. When we arrive in Kenya, we’ll also being doing a three week course about living in east Africa (our field training course). These are all important for fitting in well and being able to work successfully in a culture that is not your own.

A few things we’re learning from our reading:

• “Time for Africans is defined by events rather than the clock or calendar…. If you invite an African for dinner at 8pm, your guest may not arrive until 9:30pm, unless you make it clear that you are not on African time.”
• “Consensus is crucial in decision making.”
• “Resources are to be used, not hoarded.” (Therefore, if you have something that is not being used, it can be acceptable for someone to take it if they have a use for it.)

While we’re not required to learn another language, we want to learn some basic Kiswahili. In Nairobi, English is spoken widely, but knowing a little Kiswahili can be beneficial to building relationships with people in the area. And, there are places where we may travel where Kiswahili may be more widely spoken than English.

We’ve started with RosettaStone’s level one course learning numbers, colors, objects and other basic vocabulary. It’s been all reading and listening so far. During our cross-cultural training course, they said that doing a lot of listening is a key to achieving the most natural accent when you begin to speak a new language. In this first group of lessons, the narrator says a word, phrase or sentence, and you have to choose which image represents what was said. On this page, you would choose the picture of a dog, because Mbwa means dog.

A little more on accents (from what we learned in our training)… Our accent comes from how we’re learned to pronounce words. When we try to pronounce words in a foreign language in the same way we would say words in our own language, then you’ll hear an accent. But, if you listen to that foreign language well, and learn to pronounce words in the same way that native speakers do, the idea is that you’ll have little to no foreign accent.

The point is that languages have their own unique collections of sounds. We saw a great video in our cross-cultural training last summer of someone imitating language sounds without knowing any actual words in those languages–creating fake Russian, Japanese, French, and more. Check it out and see what you think of his imitations.

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