Learn Good Swahili: Volume 2 of 3: Swahili-English Dictionary

by Zahir K. Dhalla

Learn Good Swahili is presented in 3 Volume 1: A Complete Grammar. 349 pages. Volume 2: 6,000+ words Swahili-English Dictionary. 370 pages. Includes a built-in mini-thesaurus. *,**see examples below. Volume 3: 6,000+ words English-Swahili Dictionary. 427 pages. Includes a built-in mini-thesaurus. *,**see examples below. Volume 1 contains step-by-step explanations of all features of Swahili grammar, with lots of examples and exercises, plus indexes. For anyone new to Swahili or wants to improve or brush up - whether you are a tourist, an expatriate, a volunteer, etc in East Africa - these are the books you need to enhance your experience there, for being able to communicate with locals in their language is always most satisfying. All proceeds of this book will go to needy school children in Tanga, Tanzania where the author was born, grew up and finished high school. *An example of a dictionary entry: lingana   v     match e.g. kusoma kwa mtoto kunalingana umri wake, the child’s reading matches her age where "v" indicates verb. All Swahili text in all volumes is italicized as seen above, to visually distinguish it from all the other English text. **The built-in mini-thesaurus takes two forms: (1) Related Words e.g. the entry for "abadan" has Related Words, as ["F" = foreign-origin; "adv" = adverb] abadan   F   adv    always e.g. yeye abadan haridhi, he is never contented Related baadaye, later/then daima, always halafu, then huenda, sometimes kabla ya, before kamwe, never kila mara, every time, always kisha, afterwards milele, forever punde, shortly sasa, now zamani, earlier (2) Words grouped under the following body, building structure, fauna, food, person, produce, terrain, tool, utensil, vegetation (including flora) and for adjectives, colours e.g. some of the entries under body are, in alphabetical order in [entries in brackets such as "(m,mi)" = (singular, plural prefixes); "n" = noun; "V", "xFF", "xFV", "U", "T" are noun groups as explained in Volume 1, Chapter 3: Nouns] mkono(m,mi)   n arm              V kwapa(-,ma)   n armpit           xFF mgongo(m,mi)  n back       

109 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 10, 2017

Reviews

[Dr. S. Conger · Rating 1 out of 5]

Skip this dictionary

I've been doing Domingo to learn Swahili and have struggled with verbs and pre/posts fixes for the various word groups. I bought book 1 and decided to go for the dictionary as well. Both books have roughly the same first 25 or so first pages. This volume wastes another 25 or so pages citing poems and line by line translations. The actual dictionary I found to be useless for two reasons. First it only has a few hundred words, many of which are repeated several times. Plus the words provided are not needed in daily conversation so are useless. Second, because there are so few words, what one is likely to need to look up, is unlikely to be found. I recommend saving your money on thus one.