
The FSI Swahili Basic Course aims first of all at assisting the student to develop ability in understanding and speaking everyday Swahili of a standard variety. On the basis of well-established speech habits, he can then go on with relatively high efficiency to the further skills of reading and writing. The course is designed for use in any of three general types of study situation:
(1) a full-time language program of thirty or more hours per week,
(2) a language program in which one or more part-time students attend class for three to six hours per week, and
(3) (much the least desirable) individual study in the absence of any speaker of the language.
In any of these situations, the class should be guided in such a way that it concentrates on one small task at a time. For this reason, the 150 units of the course are comparatively short. Each unit is in turn divided into a brief dialogue (with notes) and a series of short exercises. The dialogues and exercises are further broken up into individual lines. In most of the exercises, there is a further division into two or three columns. The word or phrase at the left is called the "cue." The sentence in the next column is the 'desired response' to that cue. In those exercises having a third column in Swahili, the sentence in the second column is intended to serve as a secondary cue, and the corresponding sentence in the third column is the desired response to it.
The Swahili language or Kiswahili, is a Bantu language spoken by various ethnic groups that inhabit several large stretches of the Mozambique Channel coastline from northern Kenya to northern Mozambique. Closely related languages, sometimes considered dialects, are spoken in the Comoros Islands and Somalia. Although only five million or so people speak Swahili as their mother tongue, it is used as a lingua franca in much of East Africa, and the total number of speakers exceeds 140 million. Swahili serves as a national, or official language, of four nations: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Some Swahili vocabulary is derived from Arabic through more than twelve centuries of contact with Arabic-speaking inhabitants of the coast of southeastern Africa. It has also incorporated Persian, German, Portuguese, English, and French words into its vocabulary through contact during the past five centuries.
Swahili is spoken in: Kenya
Swahili is also called: Arab-Swahili, Kisuaheli, Kisuahili, Kiswaheli, Kiswahili, Suahili, Swahili