Learning a new langauge provides a window into a new culture. It is also associated with increased empathy, mental accuity, and even improve the structure and integrity of white matter in the brain [1]. Learning Swahili specifically is rewarding for a variety of reasons:
It's widly spoken, and growing.
Swahili is the lingua franca of East Africa, spoken by over 200 million people [1]. It is the first langauge of those living in urban centers in Tanzania and Kenya, and a second langauge to those living in rural areas and the surronding region. Swahili is taught around the world, with over 100 institutions in the US along offering Swahili coursework. Attempts to make Swahili a pan-African langauge. Swahili is taught as far away South Africa The African Union (AU) adopted Swahili as an official working languageIt's relatively easy.
U.S. Department of State indicates that Swahili proficiency requires 36 weeks of study on average, indicating it is of similiar difficulty to German [2]. Though Swahili has little in common linguistically with English, a number of factors make Swahili langauge learning straighforward. Swahili uses the standard latin alphabet. Spelling is phonetic and all letters have a single sound. Exceptions to langauge rules are rare. The structure of typical Swahili words dictates that spoken Swahili well-enunciated, making it easy to understand native speakers.East Africa
Swahili has two principles features that may facinate English speakers: aggultination and noun classes. Aggultination is the process of forming complex worlds by combining interchangable word components (morphemes) each of which has a specific syntactic feature. Interestingly, aggultinative language are found throughout the world, includng Finnish, Navajo, Japanese, and Turkish. Consider the Swahili work "hawataotuplia" which means "those who will not pay us". Indeed it may come as a suprized that this can be communicated by a single work, but in fact ha - wa - ta - o - tu - lipa Not - they - will - those - us - pay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination A common example That tall person who read that long book. Yule mtu mrefu aliyekisoma kile kitabu kirefu. Those tall people who read those long books. Wale watu warefu waliokisoma vile vitabutu virefu. Noun classes
Since Swahili is such a regular langauge, it is tempting to enumerate all the exception whenever introducing a rule. We don't do that here to readability.
Duolingo: Amazing Talker: My friend Glory https://en.amazingtalker.com/teachers-and-tutors/glory-henry-kimonge Simplied Swahili by Peter M. Wilson https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/772097.Simplified_Swahili