I’ve published my Swahili Grammar Guide!

A while ago, I wrote a Swahili Grammar Guide in coordination with my teacher. It took years to barely pay for itself (I had to pay him for his help in editing it, of course), so now that it has, I’m putting it online for free, even though that costs me money. I might put ads on it later.

Check it out here: swahiligrammar.com.

It’s somewhat surreal reading it, because I really don’t remember much Swahili at all, other than the basics. I spent ages getting quite good at it, but it takes commitment over a period of years to really learn a language. I’m much more comfortable in around eight other languages. Still, Swahili lurks somewhere there in the background.

Swahili is a Bantu language. We learned it as part of our quest on Discover Discomfort to learn languages as vehicles for understanding something about other cultures.

The process of building this site itself was quite interesting. It’s a React single-page application that publishes all the contents based on a single markdown file and a JSON metadata block, plus some images.

I might abstract it so it downloads those assets from a server, and generates the JSON and image assets using AI… so it becomes a site publishing tool where you upload a markdown doc and it generates an entire site. Would fit only some very specific use cases though, so I’m not sure it’s worth my time.