Kiswahili/Swahili: Msingi Wa Kusema Kusoma Na Kuandika/A Foundation for Speaking Reading and Writing

This is an honorable book that is out of print and sold as used. It is one of the few available Swahili textbooks. There is audio that can be downloaded from the 5-college website. Listen to audio slowed-down to about 70%. The book teaches the basics satisfactorily, but it has big pictures and wastes space. Besides this, download and listen to the language transfer in swahili, it is free, oral only, and does a very good job on the verbs and class nouns. (It is chatty and uses a French lady for a learner, which kills the pronunciation, but that is another matter.) Also find on the web and download the free old foreign service institute course and audio. With all of these, you can learn Swahili decently.

This book is great with or without a teacher, it is easier to plough through with a teacher, but not impossible without, just might take a while longer. I have used it with both and it is so insightful. Short stories in Swahili about Swahili culture all along the coast and helps to form understanding of the swahili language as well as what place it takes in different parts of east Africa. The exercises are simple, yet very very essential and you will find yourself being pushed at every chapter. It really does lay the foundation for beginners Swahili and starts pushing into beginners intermediate by the end. At the back there are riddles, shorter stories, sayings and there is even a chapter on poetry, it is a great book, in fact the base book i would recommend for those serious about wanting to learn Swahili

Corso che corrisponde alle aspettaive.

I am a complete newbie to Swahili and decided that this was going to be one of my first books. I have to say, it's my favorite one so far! As other reviewers have mentioned, it is extremely well-paced and set up like a textbook- each chapter is fairly short and starts off with short dialogue of two people exchanging greetings in Swahili, then proceeds on to questions and answers, a half page or a page of stories in Swahili (covering relevant topics such as East African history or culture), explanations of bits of grammar, questions to answer yourself and then a vocab list. It is very concise and had me actually reading and understanding the entire page of stories from the first day! I have never regretted buying this and recommend it if you are new to the language...you will pick up some of the basics very fast and be ready to progress when the book is finished! The only thing I didn't like about it is that I wish the writers of it made more books for higher levels, as I love the style they made it in!

This is a nice book for learning formal Swahili. I would highly recommend getting the companion workbook along with this book. We used this book for my Swahili course at University of Michigan for 101 and 102. It makes learning much easier. Even though there are minimal pictures in the book, it is a good resource for anyone just beginning with the language.