Learn Chinyanja from Native Speakers

Learn Chinyanja Pronunciation

Chinyanja, the principal language of Malawi, is spoken not only in that country but by large numbers of Malawians in neighboring countries. This course is intended to give the student a start in the language, both by providing them with materials for study, and by guiding them in taking over more and more of the responsibilities connected with language learning. The goal is the ability to speak a little Chinyanja well, and ability to learn much more of it as is needed for individual work situations in Malawi.

Speakers of English who are studying Nyanja find the pronunciation less difficult than it is confusing. Nyanja has no "clicks", no ''whistling z's" and no "coarticulated stops", yet published descriptions of the consonant sounds of the language leave the would-be learner in doubt at some crucial points.

An example from English may help to make the problem clearer. Suppose that a speaker of some other language has learned to pronounce English top in two ways: in both pronunciations he closes his lips in order to form the 'p'. In one, he allows his lips to open immediately thereafter, and a small puff of air escapes: in the other he keeps his lips closed indefinitely. Each pronunciation is quite common in normal spoken English. His question is, 'how important is this physical difference? Are there some words in which only one of these is correct, and other words in which the other is required? Or may I just forget about the difference and use these two sounds intercnangeably?" The answer, of course, is that the two are interchangeable. For that reason, we need not and do not represent the difference when we write. But the same student of English may find the physical difference between tie and die just as subtle as the difference between the two pronunciations of top. Yet native speakers of English do not interchange the sounds that begin these two words. The foreign learner of English must keep them apart from one another: and the difference is reflected in our spelling by the fact that we have the two separate letters t and d.

Returning now to Nyanja, the student will hear sounds that resemble the dz in adze, and others that are similar to the z sound in as. He has no serious difficulty in making either one of them, but he still needs to know what status this physical difference has within Nyanja. Are there some words where he must use dz and not z, and others where z is right and dz wrong? Or may he forget about the physical difference and use the two sounds interchangeably? And what about a p-like sound with no aspiration (puff of air) after it, and a p-like sound that is followed by strong aspiration? How much attention should he pay to this difference?

You will learn these differences with this course