All you can do is laugh...at yourself!

Learning a new language has proven to be quite challenging at times but it has also given us a few good laughs! One of the first things we learnt to say, besides “habari” (how are things?) and “assante” (thank-you), was “sielewi” (I don’t understand). This little phrase has come in handy as often we really don’t understand what is being said! Now in Swahili there are many words that sound and look the same but mean completely different things (so we’re finding out!). The word “sielewi” stems from the verb “elewa” (understand), so we didn’t think anything of it to say “silewa” (you are supposed to add ‘si’ to the beginning of the word to make it negative when it is in the first person) to people when we didn’t understand what was being said. People would usually smile encouragingly or sometimes laugh and would slowly repeat what they had just said. The other day while in language class we all had an “aha!” and “oh-oh” moment at the same time . . . it turns out our “silewa” phrase actually means “I’m not drunk”!! It only took a few seconds to realize that by omitting the “e”, we were telling people that we were not drunk instead of telling them we didn’t understand! There have been a number of similar incidents since, for example I was trying to use “kusini” (south) in a sentence but kept pronouncing it as “kuzini” (which means adultery!). Another word that we kept misusing was “taka” (verb to want); we would say “tako” (which means buttocks!) –talk about making a sentence awkward! I’m sure there will be many more incidents when we’ll completely butcher the language and make interesting statements and/or requests!
Although it has been challenging and we’ve been cramming a lot of grammar and vocabulary into a short amount of time, we’re slowly getting the hang of it!