Through the Seasons

English to Swahili

There are two problems.

One.  I must construct my sentences in very casual English because a lot of what I want to say in Swahili can’t come directly from the English sentence I’m thinking of.  I have to first convert it to a more proper way of saying things.

Two.  Even “good” English can’t be translated literally word for word.  My brain doesn’t like this.  Something about the way I think makes me want to go word by word through my sentence translating it.  Once I get stuck on a word I just stop.  My brain freezes.  And a lot of times the answer is simple.  I’m just thinking too hard about saying the exact English sentence in Swahili.  I’ve got to learn to think more in broad meanings.

But overall, the Swahili is going along well.  Jonathan is still speaking a lot.  I mainly just think in Swahili.  The worst is when I wake up in the middle of the night struggling through Swahili sentences in my mind.  That disturbs my sleep and must stop. 

An interesting thing about Jonathan and I as a couple is that he is better at making complete sentences.  He just can’t remember all the vocabulary.  I, on the other hand, can remember a lot of vocabulary but struggle to construct complete sentences.  So I end up staying quiet, listening to what he’s saying to someone, while he goes on and on every once in a while turning to me and saying, “What’s the word for this?”  And I’ll tell him.  I think I get stage fright sometimes too because when I actually go to speak I’ll sometimes forget the most simple words that I use all the time in class or with Jonathan.  With strangers the words escape me if I’m actually trying to say them myself.  So for now I guess I’ll think in Swahili and settle for being Jonathan’s dictionary. 

A good exercise for me would probably be to translate this blog post into Swahili.

Labda baadaye.  (Maybe later.)