i was at some point planning to add YouTube to the list, but i have recently been given news the hard way (attempting to use it myself) that YouTube hates showing people videos in anything other than their native language, making it very hard to just watch stuff naturally in other languages

so i'm currently looking for alternatives !

any kind of alternatives work to be clear ! this includes:

-general video sharing platforms other than youtube

-video sharing platforms dominated by any non-english language

-browser extensions that remove the AI auto-dubbing and video title translating from youtube

-more if you think it fits !

So if you don't mind, could you share some advices or where you get resources to learn Swahili?

Thanks!

Hi! Yes, here are some resources for you.

Language Transfer - This is a podcast you will see recommended anywhere you look for Swahili resources. It is very good and you will not get a better introduction anywhere else. This thing got me to speaking level when I visited Tanzania - its incredible for speaking & listening skills. Swahili is written phonetically so you can write what you learn here easily too.

2SeedsSwahili - Blog page from 2013 for people visiting Tanzania for aid projects. It introduces things at a similar order as the Language Transfer course, but it has written exercises for each unit. Some people prefer this over Language Transfer, but I prefer to use them together as complimentary reading/writing and speaking/listening activities.

University of Kansas - Instructional slideshows used in KU's Swahili course. There's a lot of good vocabulary here, but it can be pretty overwhelming to view all the slides without explanations. I mostly use this to recheck grammar concepts or choose new words to learn.

Swahili Cheat Sheet - Very complete grammar cheat sheet for Swahili. Some of this stuff doesn't make too much sense if you haven't learned a more complete explanation of it, but is extremely helpful for when you understand the basics & need to remember a certain noun ending or how to make a passive verb.

Language Crush - YouTube channel of Swahili speakers from different areas & accents. These videos are made for learners and all have properly made captions to follow along with. Great listening practice.

Now that you have some resources, here's some Swahili & general language tips:

Swahili is agglutinative. This means a lot of information is contained inside the verb, much more than we do in English. It also has a dozen noun classes (similar to genders in European languages) that impact verbs & adjectives. The grammar structure is very important to understand and you cannot skip it. This is not a language where you can go vocabulary-first and ignore grammar.

Fortunately, Swahili grammar is extremely consistent! Once you know a rule, there will be almost no exceptions. Don't let the complex grammar dissuade you, I promise once you get the gist of it, its much much easier than memorizing arbitrary genders or inconsistent verb conjugations of many European languages!

Choose one source and stick with it. Either Language Transfer or 2 Seeds will get you the basics. Once you have a foundation for grammar, then you can start doing reading & listening. Consistency is more important than having a billion sources.

Swahili has a lot of words. I swear to god, you look up any word in a dictionary and there's 4+ results. Knowing whether you want to learn Kenyan or Tanzanian Swahili can help guide which words you choose to learn, but you might need to dig to figure out which words are used where. Find a news website for the locality you'd like to learn and Ctrl+F them to see which words they tend to use.

Every Swahili dictionary has a major flaw, so you will probably need to reference multiple. MobiTuki has a very complete vocabulary selection, but annoyingly only includes noun class info when searching Swa-Eng. So if you're looking up a new word, you'll have to search Eng-Swa, then Swa-Eng to find the noun class. African Languages tells you the noun classes, but gives a ridiculous amount of results per search and sometimes gives duplicate results. Glosbe is the only website with example sentences, but I've found some of them to be inaccurately translated or not actually tell you which words are which. Lastly, WordHippo is my most used dictionary because it gives you contextual phrases for words, but it can be overly simplistic and doesn't give you noun classes.

I've been exploring various reading resources online. While graded readers and texts are useful, they can get a bit repetitive so here are some publications and sources you might find useful.

Economics/Business focus

If interested in economics or trying to improve your business vocab try: 21Jingji. They also have quite an interesting Culture and Opinion column. https://www.21jingji.com/

https://www.yicai.com/

https://cn.nikkei.com/. This however requires a subscription for some articles.

Reading

Book or literature commentary/recommendations. Especially useful if you're branching out or interested in Chinese literature and need something to add to your reading list. https://www.thepaper.cn/list_26878.

https://www.zymk.cn/ For manhua enthusiasts, quite a large selection available.

https://www.chinawriter.com.cn/ For writers and also readers. Good for reading commentary, getting book recommendations

https://www.chinawriter.com.cn/404022/index.html a supplementary gazette to the previous source

Fashion/Lifestyle

In traditional Chinese but still relevant https://popbee.com/

https://www.vogue.com.cn/

https://lifestylecn.com/zh-cn

https://www.milkx.com/zh/ It appears that the Simplified Chinese version isn't being regularly updated, so Traditional version is most up to date.

https://www.rayli.com.cn/

Culture

Lifeweek. Quite a lot of interesting topics, I recently read about Osmanthus wine from Jiangnan and learned about the fermenting techniques.

https://www.meishichina.com/ Anything and everything food related including a vast range of different recepies and news. 1000% recommend.

https://culture.chineseplus.net/ A cool website to explore different parts of Chinese culture in small video tidbits. So this technically is more listening and watching, but I had to include it here.

General Newspapers

https://www.xinminweekly.com.cn/

Of course! I'm glad they were able to help! (⁠｡⁠•̀⁠ᴗ⁠-⁠)⁠✧

Like I said, I'm not an expert, so feel free to look into anything you're unsure about, but the best place to start is by being curious!

Honestly, I was lucky my highschool offered Japanese as a course because it really helped with learning the basics. Just wish I had taken more notes the first year. Keep up with it and keep things fresh in your mind, it helps!

Here are a couple of cute books that could help if you're interested in those as well:

Onomatopoeias / Short Stories

Whether you're looking for a site to help you master the stroke order, or if you're trying to compare characters across different languages, here are some useful sources for character explanations, radical breakdowns, actual examples, character evolutions from Warring States up until now, and many other interesting options.

This one is pretty good for character explanation, radical breakdown and examples e.g. where this character can be found, in what text etc. Only thing to note is that while you can change the interface language to English, the actual explanation is in Traditional Chinese, so something to keep in mind. https://dict.variants.moe.edu.tw/

2. Good for a phonetic breakdown of a character, including Hanyu, Hakka, Yale, Wade etc. Includes different fonts for comparison, and even a calligraphy option which makes me quite happy. https://www.cns11643.gov.tw/