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Complete:: Kirundi Language Course
The Kirundi course is divided into 30 units, many of which are composed of dialogues, notes, and supplemental vocabulary. The course assumes the student has no prior knowledge of Kirundi and is fully self-instructional. This means that while an instructor/native speaker would be helpful, it is not imperative to learn Kirundi with this course. There are 19 CDs and a 500 page textbook or 1 DVD with all lessons on MP3 with the textbook in a PDF file format. Unit 1: Exchanging greetings and getting acquainted. Unit 2: Looking for work Unit 3: Where do people live and work? Unit 4: Getting help in the language Unit 5: Arranging for help in language study Unit 6: Comparing notes about language study Unit 7: Family relationships Unit 8: More about family relationships Unit 9: More about family relationships Unit 10: Review Unit 11: Getting street directions Unit 12: More street directions Unit 13: Planning a short trip Unit 14: Buying food Unit 15: Buying clothing Unit 16: Buying food at the door Unit 17: Eating Unit 18: Work in the kitchen Unit 19: Restaurant and kitchen Unit 20: Review Unit 21: Caring for children Unit 22: Climate and weather Unit 23: Seasonal crops Unit 24: The geography of Burundi Unit 25: A visit to a friend's home Unit 26: Car trouble Unit 27: The government of Burundi Unit 28: Miscellaneous topics Unit 29: Short dialogues Unit 30: Short texts, with questions and answers Kirundi is the principal language of Burundi. It shares a high degree of mutual intelligibility with Kinyarwanda, the language of Rwanda. Considered together, the cluster Kirundi-Kinyarwanda ranks third among Bantu languages, after Swahili and Lingala, with respect to number of speakers. There are however two important differences bet ween Swahili and Lingala on the one hand and Kirundi-Kinyarwanda on the other: (1) Swahili and Lingala are spoken over very wide areas, and a high proportion of their speakers have some other Bantu language as the mother tongue; Kirundi-Kinyarwanda is spoken in a relatively small area, as the first language. (2) Swahili and Lingala are relatively free of troublesome complexities for the learner; Kirundi and kinyarwanda are full of them. The two books in this series which are concerned with Swahili and Lingala set out the grammar of those languages in the form of a series of individual notes, distributed throughout the units of the course. The present volume presents the details of Kirundi grammar in the same way. In addition, however, this synopsis has been prepared, first of all to provide orientation for those who plan to use the entire book, and secondarily for the student whose desire is to learn as much as possible about the language in the shortest time. Only the most important features of the grammar are mentioned at all, and the vocabulary used in the examples has intentionally been kept small. The exercises, with answers given in square brackets at the right, are not intended to make this synopsis into an auto-instructional program, but only to give the reader an opportunity to participate if he desires to do so, and to keep constant check on his understanding of the text. These are the three goals of the course, and they have implications for the ways in which the student should use the materials in the book and on the tapes: 1. He should practice the sentences of the basic dialogues until he can roll them off his tongue without conscious effort, and without noticeable mispronunciations. (Inaccurate pronunciation, particularly of the tones, reduces intelligibility much more seriously in Kirundi than in many other African tone languages.) 2. He should practice the exercise material intensively, and not just skim through it once or twice. 3. He should use initiative, imagination, and ingenuity to find ways of increasing the amount of responsibility which he takes in dealing with the practice materials. So, for example, he will not be content to repeat like a parrot. As soon as repetition after the instructor or the tape becomes easy, he will aim at anticipating the next sentence, whether in dialogue or drill, and later at adaptation of the printed and recorded materials in order to say something that is of real communicative value in the situation where he finds himself
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