Language Lessons I

I have been taking Kinyarwanda lessons for almost three weeks now. Thank God I studied Swahili for a year; I can remember almost none of it, but all the hard work I invested in laying a neural network to make sense of noun classes and negatives is serving me well in Rwanda, where the language operates in a more or less similar way. The vocabulary, however, is totally different.

So’s the pronunciation. A totally innocuous-looking word can involve the most intricate verbal gymnastics. Like this one, the first I learned from my teacher: “Muryoherwe.”

Kinyarwanda is a phonetic language: the letters always sound the same. Which makes that look easy enough. Except that “ry” sounds like you are saying “rdjo” with some kind of extended rolled R, and “rw” is like “RRRgwah”, with the “gwah” barely audible.

This is the hardest word I’ve tried to learn to say. My teacher consoles me by saying, “If you say, ‘moo-joe-hair-gway’, no problem, people will understand.”

And then, with a phrase he doesn’t intend to have in it what I hear, that my pronunciation existentially threatens my relationship with strangers, he says: “But they will feel as if there is something which is going wrong.”

And so I sit, in the corner, saying “rdjo” a hundred times a day. After all, I don’t want things in Rwanda to go wrong.