Amharic Lessons

Our Amharic lessons are progressing well.  We have a teacher, Mewael, through Garrett's office who is very good.  In his spare time, he  is studying electrical engineering.

We are enjoying trying to identify the Fidels and sound out new words although we feel like five year olds again.  There are 33 basic characters each representing a base sound.  Each base then has seven forms which changes the vowel sound that follows the base sound.  An example is Coca-Cola below.  The co (long first leg) and ca (long second leg) are from the same base modified to signal the different vowel sound.  The base has the legs the same length and is 'keh'.  The l- is a different base, but the same modification as ca, long second leg, making it la.  There are some patterns to the modifications, but also a lot of irregulars that just have to be memorized.

While there are not clicks like there are in siSwati, there are new sounds to learn.  Amharic includes "explosive" versions of the sounds t, ch, k, and p.  Garrett has gotten quite good at these, but I still struggle with them.  They also roll their r's, which despite years of Spanish I am still not capable of doing.  If only our internet was faster I would you tube it.

While we have obviously learned a lot from Mewael, my favorite Amharic lesson came at the hands of our taxi driver, Kassahun.  He had taken me to Ethio Telecom to get a new sim card.  We had just learned the word for 'I want', efellegallehu, so while waiting I decided to practice on Kassahun.  I said, "Sim card efellegallehu".  He was very pleased with me for trying to speak Amharic, but said, "Let's try again, s-im ca-r(rolled)-d".  Although I thought to myself that that was not the part of the sentence I was looking for help on, I dutifully repeated after him.  In Amharic, each sound that is written is said so this principal is also applied to English words.  He wanted me to say each syllable distinctly.  I guess I will have to work on my Amharic English as well!