Molweni! Studying isiXhosa

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Molweni! Studying isiXhosa

Postby Deinonysus » Wed Feb 21, 2018 1:58 am

Why?
I have been working hard to get my French up to an advanced level for an upcoming trip to France, and I think I've been making good progress (see my main log, but the wanderlust bug has hit me hard. As you may be able to guess by the timing of this post, it was triggered when I watched Black Panther yesterday evening, where the main language of Wakanda was isiXhosa ("isi-" is a prefix in isiXhosa and isiZulu for the class of nouns that includes languages).

So, I've been interested in isiZulu for a long time. When I was very young, I learned the Zulu hymn "Siyahamba", or "We are marching" (literally "we are going" or "we go"). It was taught to me, during an audience participation portion of a concert, by a woman who clearly did not know any Zulu, because she taught us to click using the "cluck-cluck" sound that you might use to imitate the clip-clop of a trotting horse, a sound which does not exist in Zulu. Yesterday, I checked the lyrics online to see which click it really did use, and to my surprise, it didn't use a click at all, but a regular 'k' sound. So my first experience with isiZulu included a fairly egregious hypercorrection.

I am also a huge fan of Ladysmith Black Mambazo:


But when I really fell in love with the language was when I saw this video of Zulu tongue twisters:


So why does the thread say isiXhosa and not isiZulu? I have posted before about my interest in Zulu, even as recently as yesterday morning. Well, they are very similar languages, and a few things have been driving me more towards Xhosa.

First, the best video I've ever seen on how to do the three clicks ('c', 'x', and 'q') was in Xhosa, the second in a six-video series:


Then, a month or two ago, I saw this amazing clip of Trevor Noah, who is half Xhosa, talking about and singing in Xhosa:


And finally, there's a guy who works in a shop down the street who is from South Africa who speaks Xhosa but not Zulu, so there is at least one person I could potentially talk to in Xhosa and zero that I could talk to in Zulu.

And Black Panther finalized it. After the movie, I listened to Miriam Makeba's self-titled album, which contains the click song that Trevor Noah sang in the clip. Here is the terrific first track of the album:


Pronunciation
Luckily, the fact that I've studied Icelandic, one of the northernmost languages of Eurasiafrica, will give me a slight head start in learning a language from one the southernmost. The final "L" sound of Icelandic (also found as the "LL" sound in Welsh and in the "TL" of Nahuatl) also appears on Xhosa and Zulu, and being able to distinguish between aspirated and unaspirated consonants will also help me.

The clicks also don't seem to be too hard. Two of them are commonly used by Anglophones even if they aren't part of the language, and I think I'm getting the hang of the "Q" click too. I foresee a few main challenges:
  • Learning to use new kinds of consonants:
    • Slack-voiced
    • Implosive
    • Ejective?
  • While there are only two tones, they are not reflected in the writing so I can't tell the tones just by reading a word.
  • I don't believe vowel length is reflected in writing, either

In the next post I'll discuss the resources I plan on using, which are unfortunately fairly scant.
Last edited by Deinonysus on Thu May 27, 2021 2:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Side quest - isiXhosa

Postby Deinonysus » Wed Feb 21, 2018 1:58 am

Resources
Memrise: Xhosa - an Intro
This is one of the better Memrise courses I've seen, with an explanation before each unit. Unfortunately, while there is some audio, most words and phrases do not have it. Also, the course is very short, only 362 words and phrases. I'm already close to 10% done and I've only been working on it for a day.

University of South Africa: Learn to Speak an African Language
This looks promising. There are only ten lessons, but they seem reasonably comprehensive and have full audio.

YouTube: XhosaKhaya
Unfortunately, he has only uploaded six short videos about Xhosa, but they're high quality.

Teach Yourself: Complete Xhosa
I found a copy at a reasonable price on Amazon. I got a new copy, so it should come with the two CDs and if not I can return it. I wasn't concerned with the negative reviews because they mostly deal with CD issues. My main concern is that the Complete Zulu course had a complaint that the audio was by a non-native speaker with a bad accent, and I hope the same doesn't apply to the Xhosa course. I'll let you know what I think of it when it arrives in a few weeks.

Udemy: isiXhosa for beginners. It's not free but it's quite cheap. I watched the preview video and it seems great; the teacher is a South African fluent speaker who learned Xhosa at a young age, and to my untrained ear he sounded like a native. It's a 4-week, 8-hour course. That kind of a time commitment would totally disrupt my French learning, but I think I'll check it out after my trip.

I'll add more resources as I find them.

Goals
This might sound strange, but I'm actually hoping to just burn out and get this out of my system so I can get back on track with French. Then after my trip, I can see if I want to revisit Xhosa and get it up to an advanced beginner to intermediate level before going back to German, if I can get there with the resources I can find.

Edit 2021-05-27: Here are some more resources:
  • Ubuntu Bridge: "Let's Learn Xhosa". A three-level audio course. Not quite as much audio as a Pimsleur course but comparable cost per hour (although I'm not sure if you can still buy the audio outright, as I think they have switched to a subscription model). It doesn't have built-in spaced repetition so the vocabulary content per lesson is much more dense than Pimsleur. The narrator is not a native speaker but his accent sounds quite good, and he gives some good cultural tidbits too with some humor sprinkled throughout.
  • Patricia Schonstein Pinnock - Xhosa: A cultural grammar for beginners. ISBN 1874915032. Not just a grammar, but tons of great information about Xhosa culture and history!
  • Speak Xhosa With Us - A 1998 interactive book and software package. It somehow mostly works on my Windows 10 PC!
  • J.C. Oosthuysen - The Grammar of isiXhosa. ASIN B07XPCN5YZ. I got the Kindle edition but the formatting is abysmal; unfortunately I couldn't find any physical copies for sale so that's what I'm stuck with. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07XPCN5YZ
  • J.S. Claughton - "The Tonology of isiXhosa." https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/11985212.pdf

My updated goal for Summer 2021 is, I'm just working on Xhosa for the moment and I'm happy to keep working on it as long as I have interest!
Last edited by Deinonysus on Thu May 27, 2021 3:34 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Re: Side quest - isiXhosa

Postby Xenops » Wed Feb 21, 2018 3:01 am

I'll just add this here:

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Re: Side quest - isiXhosa

Postby Deinonysus » Wed Feb 21, 2018 3:37 am

Xenops wrote:I'll just add this here:
...
Yes! I will need to get my hands on a copy of that with the full Zulu dub.

I'm not sure exactly how much Zulu I will be able to understand based on whatever level of Xhosa I reach, but what little I have learned so far seems to be mostly identical. It seems that Wiktionary's Zulu entries are much more complete than Xhosa, and the Zulu entries have full inflectional charts while Xhosa entries do not if they even exist. So far, I've been able to figure things out about Xhosa from the Zulu entries, but as I learn more, I'm sure the differences will become more apparent.
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Re: Side quest - isiXhosa

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Feb 22, 2018 4:01 pm

I found a good Xhosa course on Udemy: isiXhosa for beginners. It's not free but it's quite cheap. I watched the preview video and it seems great; the teacher is a South African fluent speaker who learned Xhosa at a young age, and to my untrained ear he sounded like a native. It's a 4-week, 8-hour course.That kind of a time commitment would totally disrupt my French learning, but I think I'll check it out after my trip.

I've reached the third level of the Memrise course, which teaches nouns. That's made me take a closer look at noun classes. They're a common feature to Bantu languages, and there are a total of 22, but no known language has all of them. Xhosa and Zulu share 15 which are mostly identical except for some minor spelling variations; Zulu also has a 16th class (actually called #17 because of how Bantu classes are numbered in general), but that seems to be a variation of class 15, and the basic forms are identical.

I found a great chart of the Xhosa noun classes here.

A noun class seems to act like grammatical gender, but the categorization is much more systematic. And it might seem scary at first: a language with 15 genders? :shock: But in fact, 6 of the classes are just plurals of other classes, so there's only really 9 classes. And again, the categories are much more systematic than grammatical gender. Here are a couple of examples:
  • Umntu (class 1) is a human (umuntu in Zulu, one of the first differences I've noticed so far), and the plural is abantu (class 2). But class 14 (ubu-) is used for abstract nouns, so the general concept of humanity (as in, the spirit of humanity) is ubuntu, which the is where the Linux distribution gets its name.
  • And the English language is isiNgesi (class 7), but a member of an ethnic group is class 5, so an English person is iNgesi.
Compare this to grammatical gender:
  • French: un tour (masculine) is a tour, but une tour (feminine) is a tower.
  • German: der See (masculine) is the lake, die See (feminine) is the sea, and das See (neuter) is a municipality (Gemeinde) in Austria.
Why? Well, Gemeinde is neuter so that makes sense (edit: it's feminine, correction from Systematiker), but as for the rest, why is one meaning masculine and one feminine? No clue.
Last edited by Deinonysus on Fri Feb 23, 2018 6:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Side quest - isiXhosa

Postby Deinonysus » Fri Feb 23, 2018 4:10 pm

I've tried brute-force learning vocabulary, but I keep confusing the class prefixes, so I think it will really help to learn the class system better. I just realized that you can make tables in BBcode just like with HTML, so here's a quick and dirty chart that I'm working on memorizing:

SingularPluralAnchor word
umabaperson
uookinship
umimitrees
i(li)amaethnic groups
isiizilanguages
iii/izianimals
ulu/uii(zi)verbal nouns
ubu-abstract
uku-infinitive

Mnemonics
The anchor words that I chose are examples of kinds of words that can fall in each category. This is definitely not meant to be exhaustive. I just want enough to start forming connotations. The anchor words are very helpful for creating mnemonics for words where the connection isn't immediately obvious:

um, imi (trees):
-buzo (question): A question can branch out and lead to other questions
-sebenzi (job): - You get a job by branching out and networking

i(li), ama (ethnic groups):
-fu (cloud): I am proud to be a cloud
-khaya (home): Kya's home is with the water tribe (bonus points if you get the reference)
-sele (frog): Insert obvious French joke (je rigole, c'est une belle langue)

isi, izi (languages):
-kolo (school): You can learn languages in a school
-hlangu (shoe): Shoes have tongues.

i, ii/izi (animals):
-fani (surname): Many people have animals in their surnames
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Re: Side quest - isiXhosa

Postby Systematiker » Fri Feb 23, 2018 5:46 pm

As an aside to isiXhosa, which is indeed a neat language,

Deinonysus wrote:Why? Well, Gemeinde is neuter so that makes sense, but as for the rest, why is one meaning masculine and one feminine? No clue.


die Gemeinde. And I think you're talking about a specific place, so that town wouldn't be neuter either.
Just to get more confusing: On occasion you'll find "der See" (as "sedes" = episcopal see), which is taking its gender from Bischofsitz/bischofstuhl, or the same as "die See" taking the feminine of "sedes" itself.

But yeah the rest of it doesn't make sense to me either.
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Re: Side quest - isiXhosa

Postby Deinonysus » Fri Feb 23, 2018 6:09 pm

Systematiker wrote:As an aside to isiXhosa, which is indeed a neat language,

Deinonysus wrote:Why? Well, Gemeinde is neuter so that makes sense, but as for the rest, why is one meaning masculine and one feminine? No clue.


die Gemeinde. And I think you're talking about a specific place, so that town wouldn't be neuter either.
Just to get more confusing: On occasion you'll find "der See" (as "sedes" = episcopal see), which is taking its gender from Bischofsitz/bischofstuhl, or the same as "die See" taking the feminine of "sedes" itself.

But yeah the rest of it doesn't make sense to me either.

Oops! I guess I just saw the "Ge-" and assumed neuter without checking. Thanks for the correction and further examples!

Wiktionary does give the gender of See, Tyrol as neuter, but then again it's Wiktionary so it could be wrong.
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Re: Molweni! Studying isiXhosa

Postby Deinonysus » Thu May 27, 2021 3:52 pm

Well, I'm back to Xhosa. It's my favorite language and I can't stay away from it for very long, although usually I get intimidated by the pronunciation and quit after a week. But I've been at it for about a week so far and I'm still picking up steam!

I changed the title from "Sidequest - isiXhosa" because right now it's the only language I'm studying and I'm not itching to get back to something else. I had been lackadaisically studying German for a while but Xhosa has given me the push to make language learning my main hobby for the first time in months.

I signed up for a Xhosa lesson iTalki tomorrow. Not only will it be my first iTalki lesson, it will be my first one-on-one language lesson ever (excluding some Spanish tutoring I unenthusiastically accepted in high school)! I'm excited but a bit nervous. I don't know exactly what to expect. I am usually pretty confident about learning grammar and vocabulary on my own and I generally have a good ear for pronunciation, but Xhosa's phonology is very challenging and none of the resources I could find give it more than a cursory explanation, so I think in this case private lessons are necessary for my goal of speaking Xhosa with an accurate accent. If it were just the clicks and the aspiration contrasts I think I would figure it out eventually, but the tones are what really leave me scratching my head. They aren't obvious like in Mandarin or Navajo; like in Norwegian, they're buried under the overall prosody of the sentence and they're very tough to pick out.

Of course since Xhosa is a bit esoteric my usual resources (Pimsleur, Assimil, and Duolingo) are not available. In fact, I have found so many resources that I need to narrow them down so I don't get overwhelmed. I think I will work on:
  • Ubuntu Bridge - I've been studying it in the car, so it's taking up my usual Pimsleur time slot.
  • Xhosa - a cultural grammar for beginners - I've been studying this at night before I go to sleep, so it's taking up my Assimil slot. Unlike Assimil, I'm putting the vocabulary for this book into Anki. I've started with the vocabulary in chapter 3, which mostly consists of Xhosa names.
  • Learn Xhosa With Us - This is interactive and I'll plan on using it during the day, so it will take up my Duolingo time slot. I haven't completed any lessons at the moment but I did poke around in it when I first bought it, which I think was some time last year.

Limiting myself to these resources does mean that I'll be missing out on some other high quality resources such as Teach Yourself Xhosa, but if I end up finishing the resources I'm working on now I'll start in on others.

: 1 / 18 Ubuntu Bridge - Let's Learn Xhosa
: 3 / 67 Xhosa: A cultural grammar for beginners
: 0 / 20 Speak Xhosa With Us

Chess

Language learning has pushed chess to the back burner but I'm still working on it. I had decided earlier that I didn't want to learn any more opening lines until I'd mastered the middlegame and endgame, but honestly I enjoy learning about openings and as a long-time language learning hobbyist I know how to memorize. Learning 5000 lines of theory isn't intimidating to me. A common piece of advice is to leave opening theory until you're good with tactics, but honestly I think I do just fine when I'm out of book, so I think I'm ready to get encyclopedic with openings. I thought playing chess 960 would be freeing but actually I just don't know where to begin. When I play standard chess I at least have a good plan for the first few moves and have an idea of how to improvise my way into a decent middlegame position, so it's worse the risk of running into someone else's superior preparation.
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Re: Molweni! Studying isiXhosa

Postby Deinonysus » Sat May 29, 2021 1:47 pm

I had my trial lesson yesterday and had my very first Xhosa conversation! It was very basic, with just some simple pleasantries that I had learned before the lesson, but it was still a conversation! The lesson was a bit different than I was expecting. Rather than discussing and working on my specific goals, the teacher stuck to his script and walked me through the first chapter of a textbook. Immediately after the lesson, I was a bit disappointed and thought, I know how to go through a book on my own, this isn't what I need. But I thought about it a bit more and this morning I realized that at the price I'm paying, it's unreasonable to expect a teacher to come up with a brand new custom curriculum. There is no Pimsleur or FSI for Xhosa and this may be my only opportunity to get active conversation practice, so I think it would be worth it to go forward with lessons and go through this book. It'll still be less than I paid for Pimsleur German.

I have developed some concerns about the Ubuntu Bridge course. While the presenter seems quite fluent, he is not a native speaker and I'm not sure because of my untrained ear but I think he does make some consistent mistakes. He has a tendency to aspirate everything, but the contrast between aspirated and unaspirated consonants is very important in Xhosa. And while he captures the lilting melody of a typical Xhosa sentence, I'm not sure exactly how precise he is on the tones. For example, the word "ewe" (meaning yes) has low tone on the first syllable and high tone on the second, but I heard him pronounce it with the tones reversed once. Also, he claimed that the prefix "u-" is exactly the same for the second person or third person (so for instance, in written Xhosa uthetha could mean you (singular) speak or he/she speaks), and that in fact Xhosa people will often mix up the concepts of you and he/she and confuse them in English. This sounds silly to me, because the u- has low tone in the second person but high tone in the third person, so they would never be confused in speech. But still, this is the only Xhosa course I have found that can be done in the car and it does contain a lot of good information and explanations, so I think I will take everything with a grain of salt but keep doing the course.

It's very hard to find written tones for a given Xhosa word, but I am trying to get my hands on a copy of the Greater Dictionary of isiXhosa, a three volume set that is basically the OED of Xhosa. I don't think it gives tones for every word but I believe it does give tones for most words, and it was recommended in J.C. Oosthuysen's The Grammar of isiXhosa for those who want a comprehensive listing of tone in Xhosa words. Once I have this dictionary I think I'll have a much easier time learning the tones of my Xhosa vocabulary words.
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