Swahili: A Foundation for Speaking, Reading, and Writing - Second Edition Second Edition

This is an honorable book that is out of print and sold as used. It is one of the few available Swahili textbooks. There is audio that can be downloaded from the 5-college website. Listen to audio slowed-down to about 70%. The book teaches the basics satisfactorily, but it has big pictures and wastes space.Besides this, download and listen to the language transfer in swahili, it is free, oral only, and does a very good job on the verbs and class nouns. (It is chatty and uses a French lady for a learner, which kills the pronunciation, but that is another matter.) Also find on the web and download the free old foreign service institute course and audio. With all of these, you can learn Swahili decently.

This is a nice book for learning formal Swahili. I would highly recommend getting the companion workbook along with this book. We used this book for my Swahili course at University of Michigan for 101 and 102. It makes learning much easier. Even though there are minimal pictures in the book, it is a good resource for anyone just beginning with the language.

This book is awesome! It helped that I knew a little Swahili and could grasp the lessons a little quicker. You will be expected to study, memorize and practice. Please note that if you look at the second footnote in the book, and contact the author, there are free spoken resources available to download, including all the answers to the exercises. Or you can just google "langmedia at five colleges". In any case, this book is a college instruction book that teaches you the language, not just words for tourists, but very thorough in tourist conversations.

I used this book along with several other resources (Simplified Swahili, Teach Yourself Swahili, Pimsleur) to learn the language independently. This was the book I relied on the most. It's well laid out with dialogues, readings and grammar notes. The emphasis is on natural topics of conversation in Africa, not on travelers' phrases, so you won't learn how to have your luggage carried to your room. Instead you'll learn about farming, fishing and schooling. The lessons progress slowly enough that I was not overwhelmed (a problem with the Teach Yourself series).I have one serious complaint, which is that the book introduces all the noun classes at once in chapter 14 -- which caused me to put the book down for almost a year before giving it another try.Learning a language on your own out of a book is very difficult, but this book is the most useful one I found. As a classroom text I think it would be excellent.

It is great, easy to understand and use, and it is interesting and fun to study. It came so fast, too. I am learning a lot!

A really helpful book for beginning Swahili learners. This was a requirement for my class and I would absolutely recommend getting this with the blue workbook if you can. The glossary in the back is helpful, as are the grammatical tips. Definitely worth the buy!

This product is a replacement for the same book and it is an excellent book that lets one understand how Kiswahil grammar works.

I bought this because I'm headed to Kenya in a few months and wanted to familiarize myself a bit with the Swahili language. It's organized well and has thorough explanations of grammatical structure, etc. Of course, the book wasn't made to be a stand-alone self study book, so there are drawbacks like no way to check my answers to questions or my pronunciation, etc., but it's still working for me.