Ke ithuta setswana

I am learning Setswana! I finally started an official class this week at the university. I’m so pleased to finally be learning more than the bare minimum. This is a crazy-fun language. There are around 15 people in my class, and we’ve all lived and worked in Botswana for at least a few months (two have lived here more than 25 years) so we all know random words and phrases but have never studied it systematically. We’ve mostly been working on grammar basics and building vocab.

Grammar pluses: you never have to conjugate verbs in the present tense, except in an easy way to make them plural. Yay! Also, you can leave out lots of the little linking words necessary in English and don’t have to do crazy Germanic word order involutions. Grammar minuses: you do have to sort of “conjugate” nouns. It turns out there are 18 classes of nouns and between the noun and verb you have to insert a “subject marker,” which is a one-syllable but essential word (e.g. “e” “di”). Sometimes you can tell the subject marker from the noun’s spelling or meaning--like all singular persons get “o,” all singular animals get “e”--but often you can’t. I’m hoping I can just mumble my way through that little syllable without people noticing too much.

Pronunciation is challenging too in many ways. Setswana is a tonal language, and I’ve never tried to learn a tonal language before. Whether you say vowels pitched a bit higher, lower, or at the same level as the rest of the word actually matters. And unfortunately this applies to many rather important words. For example, “o” means either “you” (pitched low) or “he/she” (pitched high). The verb “bua” means either “speak” or “skin a goat” depending on the tone (context should prove helpful here, one would think!). “Bring the ladder and the walking stick” can apparently be said “Lere lere lere” with three different tonal combinations. Plus there are lots of rolled “r”s and I have never successfully rolled an r in my life.

However, the best news is that in practice, English works for nearly everything in my day-to-day life (with the exception of talking to most patients--and there are always nurses to translate if I am at clinic). People are almost invariably pleased (and amused) by any efforts to go beyond the most basic greetings. One of my American friends here who knows quite a bit of Setswana says that when she uses it, 80% of the time people laugh and repeat back verbatim what she just said! They keep doing this throughout the conversation, as though they’re amazed she’s speaking Setswana at all. Even our teacher, who is great, laughs throughout most of the lesson as we attempt to make sentences or repeat her pronunciation. It is therefore difficult for me to imagine speaking Setswana about serious subjects.

By the way, we had to choose Setswana “names,” which were mostly nouns chosen out of the book (virtually every name here has a meaning: light, star, gift, friend, lion, humble, happiness, etc., which helps a lot with learning some of these basic words). I chose Molemo. Yup, you can call me “good medicine.” Good for the body, good for the soul...