Setswana on my mind

My first LPI is over! It’s such a relief not to have to worry about it anymore, but after spending so much time thinking about Setswana I thought I should actually describe the language a bit on my blog. Well first things first, my LPI went better than I thought it would! After weeks of words not sticking and feeling a little lost, I feel like I’m finally getting the basics and vocabulary doesn’t slip away from me as much.

So here are a few Setswana fun facts:
Setswana is a phonetic language, so you pronounce every syllable in a word. I can essentially read a paragraph out loud with reasonable pronunciation and still have no idea what I’m saying. Another important fact: in Setswana all the ‘G’s are pronounced like ‘H’s. For example, Gaborone (the capital) is actually pronounced ‘Haborone’.

Then, there’s a whole class of words that were imported either from South Africa or from the West. English words are ‘Setswanized’ to fit into the language or used as slang. For example, weathera = weather, foroko = fork, tshokolete = chocolate, Sateretaga = Saturday.

Finally, last week we started learning all the different noun classes. In Setswana, you don’t add an ‘S’ to the end of the word to make it plural, you add something to the front of it. There are 18 different noun classes (that I know of) that different words fall into that you need to memorize to know how to use them in a sentence. To make it more complicated, each noun class has its own possessive markers. Now, right when you think your brain is about to explode, you find out that there are strong and weak adjectives and those are used differently too. Welcome to the wonderful and confusing world of Setswana.

Hey Adrian, I took this photo for you! I love watching the birds here but it's hard to get a picture, so here's a ton of nests in the tree next to my house.