Shona Lesson 1 (Updated Version)

Shona Language Lessons - Week 1

These lessons are focused on simple conversations. The basic language skills are often enough to break down conversational barriers and to identify with others.

Shona is a relatively easy language to pronounce because vowel sounds do not alter from word to word. All words end in a vowel. Shona is a phonetic language - spelling easily indicates how the word sounds.

Shona Vowel Pronunciation

VOWEL	SHONA PRONUNCIATION	SHONA AUDIO
a	a as in army	Click here
e	e as in egg
i	i as in big
o	o as in hot
u	u as in who

All vowels are pronounced e.g. roora (marry) pronounced as ro-o-ra, and kuuya ( to come)
pronounced as ku-u-ya. Note that Shona has no l,q,x,c except the combination of ch-.

Shona Pronouns

In Shona, as in many other languages, there are different forms of addressing people depending on the familiarity of the relationship and the relative ages. Peers can be addressed casually, whilst elders, regardless of how old you are, are addressed with respect, or in the more formal way.  As such, the pronouns for ‘you’, and ‘he’ or ‘she’ change depending on how ‘senior’ the person is.

ENGLISH	SHONA	SHONA AUDIO
I	Ini	Click here
You – informal, singular	iwe
You – polite, singular	Imi
She/He	Iye
It	Icho
We	ti
Us	isu
They	ivo
You – polite, singular	mu
She	Iye
It	Icho
Their	avo

Tips for memorising Shona words

 

Here’s a useful tip for memorising words. The brain is capable of recalling pictures much faster than text, so a way to make use of this more efficient type of memory is to create a picture in your mind that associates with the word. It doesn’t matter how unique the picture is. In fact, if you aren’t remembering a word with this technique, you just need to replace the mental picture with one that is more unique and interesting to you.

For example, with the word mu which means ‘you’ in plural, you can picture yourself pointing at three people standing next to a mooing cow. How bizarre is that? But it might just work for you. Try visualising this for a few seconds.

If it doesn’t work, simply replace the mental image with something else that associates the plural ‘you’ with mu.

We’ll use these expressions in the next lesson, but for now just familiarise yourself with the variations.
Next week’s topics include possessives, greetings and the verb ‘to know’. We’ll also have a set of common phrases that follow on from the concepts in this lesson.