Design to help the English-speaking aid worker learn useful vocabulary and grammar, this little book will get you talking very fast, though not necessarily very useful. Common expressions used by tourists, such as hello and goodbye do not appear in any of the early chapters, which concentrate on noun classes and simple sentence structure. I never got through all the noun classes, not because the book was bad, but I started to realize that, since I didn't plan to go to Africa, about all I could do with Swahili was read the Nairobi newspapers, which didn't seem like much fun. What Swahili literature there is, is written in Arabic script.

However, if you like introductions to really foreign languages, you'll get a good idea of just how different they can be from this little book. ( )