Book Description

Swahili is a language in which affixes are very prevalent. Sometimes suffixes, though usually prefixes, give the sentence a whole new meaning. This makes a dictionary sort unusual as a prefix will cause the senses of a word to be sorted into different areas. On the other hand, grouping all words by their root makes it impossible for someone who does not know the root word to find it in the dictionary.When learning Swahili you must learn to hear each piece of a word or phrase which is especially difficult for native English speakers You must also learn the agreement between noun, adjective, pronoun, and even verbs.One helpful aspect of Swahili grammar is the fact that there are no articles. This can be confusing at first, but then proves to be useful, as they would have to agree with the nouns. One other very important feature of Swahili grammar is "-a," meaning "of." Each noun class has a version of this word, so it must agree with the word which it is modifying. For instance, "Chuo Kikuu cha Nairobi" means "Main School (University) of Nairobi." The "cha" is a form of "-a" that agrees with "chuo," which is in the 7th noun class.This dictionary should be a great help for learning Swahili with more than 2,000 terms and hundreds of full color photographs.