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• The Swahili Learner's Grammar Guide
• Preface
• Introduction
• Noun Classes: the Cornerstone of Swahili Grammar
• How to figure out: “What class does the noun belong to?”
• “The big bottle”, “The small bananas”: Making adjectives
• “I”, “You” or “It” in Verbs: Subject Prefixes
• This “of” that: Belonging
• “Mine” vs “Yours’: Possessives
• “My dad”, “your friend”: Short form possessives for relatives and friends
• “Some”, “Any” and “All”: Quantity modifiers -ote and -o-ote
• “Having” - the -enye particle
• “I, me, this and myself”: The basics
• “I, you, she”: Pronouns
• “This, that, these and those”: Demonstratives
• Verb basics: Infinitives and Exceptions
• The few exception verbs: Monosyllabic verbs
• “To live is to see”: The infinitive
• Simple tenses: Past, Present, Future
• “I didn’t go, I am not going, I won’t go”: Simple tenses (past, present and future) in negative form
• Common tenses: imperative, and “usually”
• “I just got here” tense: -me, the perfect tense
• “I’m wearing a hat”: The perfect “-me” tense as a state
• “He was driving fast, but he won’t be driving again”: Perfect tense in the past or future.
• “I haven’t arrived (yet)” tense: -ja
• “Come here”: The imperative tense
• “You should go now”: The optative/subjunctive
• “You shouldn’t” or “Don’t”: The negative imperative/optative/subjunctive
• “I usually wake up early”: Describing what you habitually do with “hu”
• Very common and very irregular: To be, to have, and “is/are”
• “I was, it is, she’ll be” using “to be” in Swahili: ni/si and kuwa
• “To have” in Swahili: na and kuwa na
• “There is/are” in Swahili: -na
• “Where are you? I’m here”: ko, po, and mo (the “locative copula”)
• Advanced Tenses: “Just happened”, “Already happened” and “Not Yet”
• “When we get to the market…”: The situational ki tense
• “Already happened a while ago” tense: "-mesha"
• “If I were rich…”: nge and ngali Conditionals in hope and regret
• “Then this happened”: the ka tense
• “Study as hard as you can”: The General Relative
• “It”, “Which”, “To you” and more: Objects
• “I want to eat it”: Direct objects
• “I’ll give you your money tomorrow”: Indirect objects
• “I cook for myself”: Reflexive objects
• “Who”: The tensed relative/referential concords
• “The person who came here”: The relative marker, or amba-
• “The way you look tonight” and “When I was young”: Manner and Time
• Verb extensions
• “I’ll wake you up”: adding sh or z to cause someone to do something.
• “The pizza was cooked by me”: Passive Voice “wa” extension
• “With each other”: the -na suffix