Stocktake

Muda mrefu (long time), said Yusuf, as we logged on to Zoom for my first Swahili lesson in a good while.

We did a quick stocktake of my Swahili skills. My reading comprehension is passable. My reading out loud is good, but this is essentially…reading. My ability to listen and understand is still fairly horrendous, although it has ever been thus in my history of learning languages. Progress hasn’t been quite this slow before, but this is the first time I’ve been doing it with a brain in its fifth decade.