Translation: My Swahili is very bad...

I really thought that I had learned a lot in my elementary Swahili class last semester. I mean, I can greet someone, tell them where I am from, what I study, the things that I like or dislike and a few other things about myself. Plus I can have conversations about other people, places and things. You'd think that I'd be able to hold a full on conversation with a native Swahili speaker and be completely fine. Yes, if the conversation is very basic and boring. This, I did not fully realize about my Swahili speaking ability until this intermediate class started up. Man, the instructor hit the ground running. He assumed that since it is an intermediate course, as he should be assuming, that our Kiswahili should be on point AND that we should be able to survive with him speaking little Kiingereza (English). He was a little disturbed by all of the wide eyes and blank stares on the first day of class, and he is still disturbed each time a jaw hits a table or a "sijui" (I don't know) escapes a mouth.

Of course, no class would be complete without having that 1 person who actually is on point and who sets the bar for the rest of the class. No exceptions here. There is a girl, who has spent some time in Tanzania and has obviously studied the language in some depth, who has no problem keeping up with the professor's new directions, asking questions and holding conversations with him in Swahili, and blurting out answers and correcting other students every time the opportunity permits itself. She sits with ease while everyone else is fumbling and flipping through their English/Swahili dictionaries. Don't you just hate people like that? What the hell is she even taking this class for if she doesn't really need it... just to pass the time, to fill up her schedule?? She is probably there for much of the same reasons as the other 6 of us, because she was talked into being a part of the "save the African languages at UCB" mission.

Each semester, the elementary Swahili professor gets swamped with students interested in talking his course, so he thought it would be a great idea to have an intermediate class available for those who wanted to continue learning the language. This was a great idea in theory, but it is a bit of a failure in practice for a couple of reasons. First, people are only interested in taking the elementary class because of its super easy instruction and instructor. Secondly, you only need the elementary class to fulfil the University's foreign language requirement, so there is no need for students to move on to the intermediate course. However, because some of us actually do enjoy the language and we loved the professor we decided to sign up. We have written checks that our asses can't cash.

Dispite the fact that I sit in class feeling like I have never studied the language a day in my life, I am sticking to it. I stared at the quiz this week (that was probably only suppose to take 30 minutes or less to complete) for at least an hour, with the rest of the class trying to figure out what the instructions said. Somehow I was able to piece things together enough to fill up the lines. I am hoping it wasn't too much of a disaster. He probably went home and laughed his ass off at our chicken scratch while grading the papers or there is the possibility that he might have been sadden by our poor performances. Either way, it can only get better from here on, right?