Until today, I was pretty concerned about my ability to speak Kinyarwanda. It’d been ten months since I was in an environment where I had to use it regularly, and though my understanding of the grammar has certainly improved in class in the last year, I knew I had forgotten a lot of words. Also, in trying to listen to Kinyarwanda radio in the weeks before coming, I was starting to think that the prospect of actually understanding Kinyarwanda speech was all but impossible.
That last bit may still be true. The hardest part of the whole language, at least for me at this point, is the extent to which Rwandans elide their words together (or slur, if I’m feeling especially frustrated). Basically, unless they speak really carefully, the first of any two adjacent vowels is totally unpronounced, and the last vowel of a phrase is almost always dropped (especially inconvenient because every word ends with a vowel). So a sentence like
Muzaanira inzoga ikóonje ngo acecéke.¹comes out sounding like
“Bring him a cold beer so he stops talking.”
[muzaanirinzogikóonjengwacecék]So, in the end, it is just really hard to hear a sentence and parse it into separate words. I’m sure this is hard in all languages, but I find that I am about as good at parsing words in French as I am in Kinyarwanda, and that is a language I have never studied!
But I digress.² I started the post on an optimistic note, because today I had a long Kinyarwanda conversation with a friend (A., who I mentioned often last year), and it actually worked. Like, the conversation seemed to function and flow almost normally. Only very rarely did I find myself completely at a loss for how to say what I wanted. We talked about school, friends and family, Rwanda, the U.S., and language-learning, and strayed dangerously close to religion. (She’s a Jehovah’s Witness; more about that in the next post.)
She said I was speaking much better than I had when I left last year, which was really encouraging. She also noted that there were a lot of foreigners who lived in Rwanda more than a decade without getting to my level of proficiency; I appreciated this because it shows how much she—and many others who I have heard say similar things—appreciate the effort I have put in and recognize how difficult it is.
I was also encouraged to notice that I generally understood what A. was saying. She probably spoke more slowly and with fewer words than she otherwise would have, and when she started talking to other people my comprehension fell to about 20%. Still, I was happy with myself.
¹ If you scroll far enough back, you’ll find at least one explanation of why I don’t like the standard way of writing Kinyarwanda; in a nutshell, it doesn’t mark vowel length or tone, both of which are critically important features of the language. On this blog (at least from now on), I will use the standard system except that I double vowels when they are long, and put an acute accent mark for high tones. To get to the standard orthography from there, just remove all the accents and consolidate doubled vowels. The above sentence, then, would be written Muzanira inzoga ikonje ngo aceceke.
² And I will continue to digress! It’s one of the most fun things about having a blog.
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