 This is a session of African languages, African cultures within the School of Languages, Cultures, and Linguistics. And we have a packed program. I think we only have 45 minutes. And I have a little presentation just to give you an idea of what studying is so-as-is like and the stuff we discuss within the African language of African cultures. Then we can do a little bit of playing with Swahili. I have a little Swahili taste that is just from the textbook we used. And also Alice is here. She is a student of Swahili. She is in Kenya at the moment, actually. She can probably speak more authoritatively than I can. And then we leave a bit of time at the end for questions as well. And as Amani has said, if there's anything in between, just put it in the chat. And then we can take it from there. I'm going to share my screen because I have a PowerPoint presentation. You will probably not be surprised to hear, which is here. And I'm going to get off the pen. I'll leave the chat on, actually, as you can see. If there's anything in between, please put it in the chat to work OK. Good. And then I move that about so I can see as well. Yes. So my name is Lutz Martin. I am in the Africa section of the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. I'm also half in the linguistic section. So my interest is in African languages in particular. East African languages I started with Swahili. And I already noticed that many of you are interested in Swahili. And then worked more widely in Zambia and Namibia. And recently, also, we started working collaboration with Bayehu University in Kanu in northern Nigeria. And I'm going to talk a little bit through, if I may. First of all, welcome to the Swahili's virtual open day at the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. And this is a little picture I put in some pictures just to make it a bit more lively. This is, again, some of you will know that the ferry ride from Dar es Salaam to Zanzibar. And there are still dowels going up and down, which is historically very, very significant also for the spread of Swahili. So if you study the history of Swahili, maritime trade is really, really important. And so I'm very, very fond of that picture. But of course, there's modern ferries also you can see in the background. So I briefly want to talk about SOAS and the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. Then I have a brief background on African languages. And then two more specific case studies, if you like. I want to talk about language and identity based on half of a Yellow Sun, the novel by Chimamanda Adityan, who many of you will have read. And a little bit on learning of African languages. And that leads nicely then into the Swahili taster. Good, SOAS highlights. We have 100 years or 104, I think, by now. Years of scholarship focusing on Africa and Asia. There's over 30 languages which are taught within the school. We have a national research library, one of only five in the country. And ours is specialized, of course, for collections relating to Africa and Asia. We have students and staff from over 130 countries. So it's a very international mix. It's a very diverse student population in terms of people's background, ethnicity, languages. And that for many students, I think, is part of the student experience. And of course, we have expertise in some of the world's key regions. Many of our regions are where things are happening, if you like, at the moment. The School of Languages, Cultures, and Linguistics focuses on Africa, which we have focused on today, but also near the Middle East. So we have Arabic as well, South Asia, Southeast Asia. And we have also linguistics and translation, I should add. And there's another department within SOAS for East Asian languages and cultures in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. And we work very closely together. So there's many links with that as well. And there's also young languages and cultures. We have History Department, Politics Department, Development Studies, Music, Arts, Art and Archaeology. And all these subjects are available to you through different study degrees. So in SLCL, we house the BA languages and cultures. And that is either a self-standing full degree, or you can combine that, the BA languages and cultures with something else. We have a BA linguistics with a combination. We have Arabic as well. And the other thing I can put that in the chat later, we have a very neat, I think, very nice series. We did spend the lockdown started last year, which is called Language for Lockdown, which is just short videos on the different languages we have. So you're welcome to have a look at that as well. Within SLCL, we focus on literature, film, cultures, and languages. We have a focus on Africa, of course. But also on Africa in a wider global context, that's important to us. We have a strong commitment to decolonizing education. That's a big agenda for us at the moment within the school and within SLCL and the wider source community. We have strength and translation of African languages. That's another key element. We have lots of people doing translation, including Swahili, which is our biggest language, I think, in students' numbers. And the languages we teach in the department at the moment, Ahmaric, Swahili, Yoruba, and Zulu. And we also, in principle, do house and Somali. But that's because of COVID. And that is paused at the moment. Good. A little bit of background on African languages. And this is a picture from Zambia. And you can see that it's a mobile phone company. And they say 72 languages, ethnic languages, actually, on one network, our network. So there is a pride in linguistic diversity, which is more recent. Maybe we wouldn't have gotten that maybe just after independence. And that's something which is really exciting in studying African languages. This is just a bit of demographic background, number background. So this is the number of the world's languages and there are about 7,000 languages in the world. And there's problems with counting. But as a bold figure, that's probably OK. And of those, about 2,000 are spoken in Africa. So Africa is very language rich, if you like. That's about a third of the world's languages. And the other third is spoken. Or another third is spoken in Asia. This is a map representation. I'm just showing that every little orange dot on the map represents a language. And you can see that the language diversity of Africa is clustered in the center of the continent. So Nigeria, Cameroon, and in the corner in West Africa. Also Tanzania, Kenya are very rich. And then there's less diversity maybe if you go further north and further south. A little bit of historical background during the colonial period, African languages experienced marginalization, suppression, and negative attitudes that was part of the wider cultural colonial enterprise. And then after independence, many African countries adopted a one language policy, and often promoting English or French. So sometimes you still hear people talk about Anglophone Africa and Francophone Africa, which of course, there's some reason to it. But on the other hand, it's misleading, because mostly English and French are just one language amongst many others. And I think people have moved away from that a little bit. So then the 21st century has seen the onset of what's sometimes called an African language renaissance, or the revalorization of African languages. South Africa has now 11 national languages. Uganda has a very progressive language policy. They're called main area languages. Ethiopia and the move to federalism again promoted multilingualism. So you have across the continent a development of multilingual policy in education and public discourses. And you're also at the birth of new varieties. So if you're familiar with East Africa, you will know Shing, which people say comes from Swahili, Swahili and English mixture. But that's a new urban variety. It started out maybe as a youth language, but it's not very widely spoken. In Nigeria, there's Niger or Pidgin. And in Southern Africa, people talk about trans-languishing, bringing different language together in a new creation. And I have examples here, if I may. I may. The BBC now has a Pidgin, the BBC News has a Pidgin series. So there's news in Pidgin geared towards the Nigerian market and the diaspora communities, of course. And that's on the top left there. Then at the bottom left, this is the African Academy of Languages. It's a branch of the African Union, Aqalan. They are very active in the middle. A book of a colleague of ours who has now just moved to Kenyatta University in Kenya, Ansheng, the Swahili vernacular, he calls this in Kenya. And on the right, just a picture of one of the outstanding language activists in the African context, Neville Alexander, and who promoted multilingual education in South Africa and he passed away a few years ago. This is just Swahili, again, because it's important to us. And there's lots of things to be said. So this is Swahili in the 21st century. You can see how vibrant it is. So on the left-hand side is, again, a mobile phone. I've got Louraier to Faharier to our language, our pride. You can see the link between language and national identity in Tanzania, very strong, interesting topic to study. Then in the middle one, this is in the campus of the University of Nairobi in Kenya. It's an advert for an ATM, a cash machine, in partly in Sheng, partly in Swahili, and partly in English. On the top right, that's Yomo Kenyatta Airport with bilingual signage. You can see Swahili in English there. And at the bottom right, that's a colleague of ours, Clara Mumanji, who is addressing this in many several underconferences. But this is one of the annual Swahili conference of the Kenyaki Serial Association. So you can see how rich the discourse is on language is at the moment. I briefly want to talk about language and identity, because it's important to many things we do. And I want to focus on Shimamanda Adichi, or Ngozi Adichi, in part because she is an honorary fellow of SOA. So the top right-hand side corner shows Shimamanda and she is walking after the SOA's graduation ceremony when she became an honorary fellow. So we are closer in a sense. But you will be familiar where she is a very, very famous author by now. Purple viscous and half of a yellow sun are the two big early novels, which she is famous with. And I want to focus on half of a yellow sun where the lead character, Olana, uses Ibo to claim ethnic and political identity to confront the negative attitudes of a man she sits next to on a plane journey from Cannot to Lagos in 1966. And that's a bit of a long text, but I want to share that with you. So we are in Nigeria. We are in the mid-1960s. The political situation is tense just before the Biafra war. And that's a plane journey. Of course, people traveling on the plane at that time, you can see also there's a particular social element with these are quite a lot of people. And flying from Cannot to Lagos in the north of the country I've given you blue notes in the north of Cannot and then back to the main biggest city Lagos. And then Adichi writes that Olana, the main character left on Saturday, the man sitting next to her on the plane across the aisle had the shiniest, darkest ebony complex since she had ever seen. She had noticed him earlier in his three-piece wool suit staring at her as they waited on the tarmac. He had offered to help her with the carry on back and later asked the flight attendant whether he could take the seat next to hers since it was vacant. He offered her the new Nigerian asked, would you like to read this? He wore a large opal ring on his middle finger. Yes, thank you, Olana took the paper. She skimmed through the pages, aware that he was watching her and that the newspaper was a way of starting conversation. Suddenly she wished she could be attracted to him that something mad and magical would happen to them both. And when the plane landed she would walk away with her hand in his into a new bright light. She has relationship problems. She is not in good terms with her boyfriend at the time. So that's part of why she went to Canada. So there's an emotional romantic element to it as well but nothing happens to that as you can see in a moment. So then the man says, they have finally removed the evil vice chancellor from the University of Lagos, he said. Oh, it's on the back cover. Olana turned to the back cover, I see. Why should an evil man be the vice chancellor in Lagos? He asked and when Olana said nothing, only half smiling to show she was listening, he added. The problem with evil people is that they want to control everything in this country. Everything. Why can't they stay in their East? They own all the shops, they control the civil service, even the police. If you are arrested for any crime, as long as you can say Keda, they will let you go. We say Kedu, not Keda, Olana said quietly. It means how are you? The man stared at her and she stared back and thought how beautiful he would have been if he had been a woman with that perfectly shiny, near black skin. Are you Igbo? He asked. Yes. But you have the face of a fulani people he sounded accusing. Olana shook her head, ah Igbo. The man mumbled something that sounded like sorry before he turned away and began to look through the police briefcase. When she handed the paper back to him, he seemed reluctant to take it and although she glanced at him from time to time, his eyes did not met hers again until they landed in Lagos. So what I want to do with that is I think this is really nice because the background is that we have a very political tense situation. That's 1960s Nigeria. We have the Balfour about coming 67 to 71 in which the main Igbo speaking Southeast attempts to gain independence from the rest of Nigeria and then fails. So that's the end of the war, but this is before. But then here in this context, Olana uses language to position herself in the specific space of the 1960s Nigerian political discourse. Correcting his Igbo greeting while he gets it wrong, she claims identity, linguistic identity and cultural ethnic identity and creates distance to him by correcting him. So we say K do not K do. And so the language here corrects the man's mistaken idea about her ethnic identity which was based on her physical appearance. And the example shows nicely, I think that language here is a powerful means to negotiate and express different identities. So this is something just a small example, but this is something which we are quite keen to explore in the program in different contexts how language relates to all kinds of different aspects of human life and in this particular case of ethnic and political identity. Good. I want to move on to learning Africa language. That's my second case that let me check for the time. I think we're okay. So this is just a general reasons for learning languages. The three C's is sometimes called it. So there's cognitive one C cognitive pedagogic and pedagogic reasons for language education. So bilingual and multi-lingual learners have cognitive advantages that long discussion about it but by and that's learning languages is good for your thinking I guess. And knowing several languages increases interpersonal and intercultural competence. Then if you go down to the right or move to the right and there's culture that's the second C culture identity and social cohesion reasons. So language serves as an important vehicle of cultural identity. We've just seen that language embodies cultural wisdom. So many people have seen there's lots of discourse and language endangerment in the moment over the last couple of years. And people are really worried that with the loss of languages we also lose cultural wisdom and cultural diversity. And acknowledgement and promotion of multi-lingual realities increases social cohesion. So there's also real social development aspect to it. And then finally, the third C is commercial political and business reasons. Understanding of and better interaction with different global societies, politics and markets works on the basis of speaking different languages. So I have a quote here. Actually it's an alleged quote. It's not quite your words from but many people are still using it with me. From Nelson Mandela, the South African independence leader and then first president and he allegedly said, he says something along those lines, at least. If you speak to a man in the spirit of the time, a person he means, if you speak to a person in language they understand, you speak to their head. If you speak to a person in their own language, you speak to their heart. So this, if you like dichotomy between the language of aspiration and social advancement and the language of identity and social cohesion, that's really quite important in many different contexts. And again, it's another reason for language learning. And the other reason I want to focus on now is that what we call sometimes expanding your world. So each language contains its own semantic and epistemic system. So the way we structure the world, think about it, relate to each other. In part it's related to language. So different ways of seeing and analyzing the world around us. Different categories and expressions to come to term with our shared human experience and different histories and culture memories. So learning a different language now helps us to understand these systems different from the ones we are used to. Through this, we are better equipped to understand our shared experience but actually also ourselves. And I have one example here from my own language learning experience which goes back quite sometimes in 1994 which is probably, yeah, me before you guys were around. In 1994, I started learning Oceerero, a language of Namibia, if I'm not just now under the tutelage of Professor Yilku Akavari who wasn't a professor at the time. We were both students at source. But he taught me and then we continued working together for a very long time, we were still in contact. And one of the things that he taught me, I learned were numbers. So this is a background on Oceerero. So the pictures are what it looks like. It's North Namibia, you can see it's very arid. It's very desert-y but there's also water, there's cattle. So it's lively communities. And there on the map it shows the little orange circle that's roughly where we are geographically. And then the images here, this is me in younger days as it were, sitting together with Yilku Akavari that's just a meeting we have in Botswana, I think. And then we also published a little booklet on Oceerero, a grammatical sketch and the pictures there on the right. So the numbers I was learning was Imwe for one, Imbari for two, in Dahtu for three, if you speak Swahili, Dahtu, Tahtu, you can see that these languages are related. And then the 10s and the 20s and the 100s but then I also learned 1,904. Ayubirinwe, Nomathere, sorry, there is an ambulance passing the house. Nomathere, Muvunahine, that is 1,001 and 100s, nine and four. So then why was I learning 1,900 at once? It seemed slightly random. But there actually was a very good reason for it. And that is, it's not 9,909, 1,904, 1904 and 1904, it's a number which is, it's a year which is inscribed in Herero cultural memory. So on the 11th of August in 1904, it's the date of what is called the Battle of the Waterback. The Waterback, that's the mountain you'd see that top right. And that's when the German colonial, Namibia was South West Africa at the time, under German colonial rule. And the German troops began what is called the Herero War or the Kaiser's Holocaust. There's a very good historical reconstruction of that by Olusoga and Ericsson, I can share the reference. Unraveling that, but it was a very brutal and very vicious onslaught really on the whole of the Herero community. And that has been really very important for Herero history and cultural history. So this number is really important in the cultural context. So what that means is that numbers refer to dates and dates often then change the destiny of the people. So 1904 in the Herero context, it's a bit like 1066, maybe if that means something like the Norman and Bayesian and English cultural history, or 9-11 more recently, the Twin Towers or if in the Chinese context, 1949, the communist revolution, these numbers mean something. They're not just numbers. And by learning them and engaging with them with the language, it's an entry point. It says these are entry points to different semantic and cultural networks. And so you can see on the right-hand side, that's the Watterberg, and this is the page on the little grammatical sketch with it, where we also have the little note on the 19th. Good. So that brings us to language learning. African language is at source. We have six African languages for currently running. I'm Harik, Swahili, Yoruba and Zulu. At undergraduate and master level, sometimes she will be together with both levels. We aim to integrate language study into discipline, so it's not self-standing, but it interacts with other things she do. The languages are entry points to culture and literature in the way we've just seen. We also think language study and language research is part of a wider decolonizing agenda. If you accept that people speak different languages, you learn these languages with a much better way of talking to them at the same level, if you like. And African language is also as a commitment to African values and multi-limbable practices, so there's a political right here as well. That was it on the slide. Thank you very much. As Santini from Swahili, there's these are little impressions from us. I'm going to stop sharing the slides now. I hope that gave you an impression about the academic discourses we have. If you're happy with that, there is a question that we can have a little question. I think we're okay. There's a question from Daniela. Is African studies languages offered at both undergraduate and post-grad? Also, would you say it's harder to learn language, especially one as Swahili, as a degree and also as older teenager? So African studies as a program is offered at master level. So there's an MA African studies. At undergraduate level, the program in which it's embedded is called BA Languages and Cultures. Or indeed you can learn African languages in other degrees. I think any source degree actually allows it to take African languages. But the degree in which maybe these things I talked about are contextualized. That's the BA Languages and Cultures. And that has the African language stream in it. At the moment before African languages, hopefully you can get the six languages back up running. Is Swahili difficult to learn? I don't know. Actually, that's a good question. I have a little bit of practice. Yes, we have a few minutes. And I'm just going to share that. So you get a sense of whether you think it's difficult or not. And then Alice can actually talk better about it than I can. But I'll show you one of the textbooks we use. I want to be here. I'm so sorry. Here. So this is the book. It's called Colloquial Swahili. And this is actually an older edition, but that doesn't matter. So our language learning and teaching is quite interactive. So it's communicative language. We learn grammar, but it's really also about building vocabulary, being able to use the language. So this is quite hands-on, if you like. And it would be things like this. So this is a short dialogue. Nick Brown, a German consultant working for the Tanzania Zambia Railway Company, Tazaara and Cathy Euston, an American overseas student, are both based in the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam. The two visitors have decided to take short break from work and study to go to Zanzibar Island, 50 miles from the coast of Dar es Salaam. After arriving by ferry, they are now approaching the Harbour Customs Office. And if you've done that, it's quite an ordeal. There's lots of promotion, lots and lots of people. And you have to get your passports stamped by these authorities. And it's sometimes a bit difficult to find the office, but it's also, it's entertaining in a sense, because everybody's quite good-natured about it. So this is the situation we are. And then Cathy says, Haudi, which means, I wish to enter, really, that's what it means. I'm entering a room, you say, Haudi, can I come in? And the Customs Office says, Karibu, meaning you're welcome, yes, please come in. Cathy says, Asante Habariakobana, thank you. How are you, how are your news? How are you? And the Customs Office says, Zuri, I'm fine, Karibuni. Karibuni means you're welcome to two people because it's both Nick and Cathy. So the Customs Office says, Karibu, first just here in the knock, and then Karibuni with a knee at the end, two people. And Cathy next say, Asante, thank you to the Customs Officer. And the Customs Officer asks, Hamjumbo, are you okay? How are you both? They reply to that, it's Hatujumbo. Then Nick asks, Nawebe, and you, who jumbo, Bwana, how are you? Bwana, meaning mister. The Customs Office says, Minisi jumbo, I'm fine, I don't, there's nothing wrong with me, I'm okay. How is your news, the two of you? And Cathy and Nick then say, Zuri, our news is fine. And even if it wasn't fine, you really have to say, I'm okay, before you then can say, actually, there's some issue. You probably have come across jumbo, that's quite famous. There's a little song, jumbo, Bwana. And also, I think the Lion King has some Swahili words. So this is, some of it might be familiar. So this is the translation, we've just seen that. I can briefly show you a little exercise. I mean, this is like the first lesson, so that's at the beginning. But this is about the talking to one and talking to many. So this is, sorry, there's a question chat, I can't do that quickly. It's Swahili course available for students, BSE International Relations, Politics. I wouldn't quite bet my life on it, but close to, I should think yes, but that's easy to find out. All our programs should have a language option in them. So you should be able to do this Swahili as in the International Relations as well. And then so you have like, the exercises like that. So the question is, this is about Karibu and Asante. And what we're after here is speaking to one and speaking to many. If you talk to one person, you say Karibu and Asante. So Karibu means you're welcome, Asante means thank you. But if you spoke to speak to many people, you have to put a knee in the end. So in the first example, the customs officer says to Nick and Cathy, two of them, Karibuni. So the question is, Swahili, what is the answer? What do Nick and Cathy say to the customs officer? Anybody wants to put it in the chat? The key here, so they're going to say thank you essentially, but the key is that they are speaking to one person rather than to many. So the, aha, thank you, Derek, Asante, thank you, Asante. So Asante is the answer because it's one person. Now, the second one is Nick and the customs officer say, and the customers say, ah, so say Karibu to Cathy and Cathy says to both of them, what does she say? Ah, Asante, thank you. Very good, because Nick and the customs officers are two people. Three, Cathy says Karibuni because Nick and the customs officers are two. And then Nick and the customs officer say to Cathy, please help me. They say to Cathy, Cathy is one person and they would say to her, for you guys, you think it's not fast enough, just bear with me. Karibuni, Yanni, Nick and the customs officer say to Cathy, one person. It is Asante, sorry, sorry, sorry, no, no, no, no. I think maybe this is too complicated. Asante is perfectly fine because they talk to one person. Yanni, Cathy says Karibuni because Nick and the customs officer are two, me, but then they say to her, Asante, because she is one person. So it's about how many people you are addressing, not how many people you are. So in four, Cathy and the customs officer, there's two of them, they say Karibu, because they say to Nick and Nick is only one, but then Nick in return says, what to Cathy and the customs officer, because Nick is now talking to two people, Chiara, ah-ha, plural of Asante, Yanni, Asante, me. So this is what we had, I think, in two already. And then the final one, five, is Cathy, Nick and the customs officer say Karibu, to you in this case. And then you reply to them, so you are addressing Cathy, Nick and the customs officer. So that's many people. And that is Asante, me, with the knee at the end, because it's one to three people. So if I'm talking to one of you, I say Asante, but because it's many of you, it's Asante, me. Asante was the form I had at the end of the slide, because I assume this morning that there will be a group of you. Good, I think I should stop here, because we have 10 minutes left for questions and answers. So I'm going to stop sharing my screen. And now we are back. Ah, there's both the chat and the QA. And the question from Chelsea, is Swahili question for students? Yeah, oh, sorry, that's sorry, that it was both in the chat and the QA. I think the answer to that is yes, but we can follow that up. I can make a little note. And Chelsea, actually what I'll do, answer live. I don't want to answer live, I stopped that. What I'll do is I go to the chat because I want to put my details. I'll put in the chat, my email. And then if you have questions afterwards, please get in touch and we can have an email conversation. And I also double check about the politics, but I'm fairly certain that that should be possible. If you have other questions, please either use the QA or the chat. And otherwise, I wonder whether Alice, maybe we can briefly go to you and if you could talk a little bit about your experience, and that would be helpful as well. We've got one question that's just come in just before we go to Alice. They've asked, how is the translation product for third years like? Ah, very good, very good. So again, Alice probably, you know, you can talk about it, but it's typically, it's both small texts and then sometimes also people work on longer texts. So I'm very sorry, actually, there's a very esteemed colleague of ours, Ida Hachevayanis. She is teaching a lot of Swahili, but she is unwell today, so she can't be with us. But she has just finished, or last year finished, translating Alice in Wonderland, you know, the Lewis Carroll one. And you can imagine, because Alice in Wonderland plays a lot with language, you know, there's the scene where somebody says, oh, you know, whenever I say something, it means that, and that, it means. So it's a real challenge, so she can talk a lot about the intricacy of translating that into Swahili, but her translation really has been quite popular and famous and people really like it. So there's long tradition of people doing translation work here. And we have a very strong center for translation studies as well, the other project we do actually, it's very different. We are translating an app, which is called Farm Smart, which is an app to give information about agriculture type things, which crops to use and which fertilizers and how rain works. I'm not a farmer myself, but that app was developed in English and we had the big project translating that into Swahili. So that would be a much more, if you like, applied translation. So it depends a little bit, it's project-based, but it's fairly hands-on in that there will be translation, you know, exercises and practice throughout the module. And we also just appointed actually a professor of practice, Wanguri Wangorosh, who is also translating, she's a language activist, but also translator. So she also contributes to that as well. And then we can check on the website that should tell you how the module is assessed. I'm not sure whether it's one translation or smaller bits, but I wonder whether Alice knows that, actually. I'm doing the module like Swahili translation. I don't know if that's what you're talking about. Sorry. I think so, what's that like? Okay, yes, that's what I'm doing. Sorry. Is it enjoyable? It's great. It is an amazing teacher. Yes, she really makes it enjoyable. She really, well, it is amazing at teaching both all of the subjects she teaches. She just has such passion for Swahili and translation, and she has lots of anecdotes from when she translated Alice in Wonderland about how it all works. Yeah. I can talk a bit about languages and African studies if you want now as well. So as I said, I'm third year BA African Studies, which is now BA Language and Culture. So I have studied both Swahili and Swahili, so I did Amharic too, and then I've done Swahili one, two, and three now in the third year and also doing Swahili translation. I really enjoyed both languages. I really love Amharic and I love Swahili. I know someone asked early in the chat if Swahili was hard, something that really bugs me about Swahili is every time you say you're studying it, everyone's like, oh, that's a really easy language, isn't it? And I don't find it particularly easy. But like every language, it's really like what you put into it is what you get out of it. And there's definitely a lot of resources that are so, like, so as you have students from all across the world, so you definitely find people to practice with and there are different resources. Oh, I've forgotten what it's called, but there's something where you can talk to someone who speaks your language online so ask them a couple of sessions. What else is there gonna say? Oh, yeah, so as part of my degree, I was meant to have a year abroad in my third year, so it was meant to be a four-year degree. Unfortunately, that didn't happen due to corona, but I would definitely recommend looking into that if that's something you're interested in. I did it myself, so I'm now, because everything's online, I'm doing it from Kenya and I was in Tanzania. So it's a great space to practice and I know people that have been on the year abroad in previous years, not just to East Africa, but different year abroad with different courses and they loved it so much. And it's really beneficial, you get to know the community and definitely practice your language skills so much. What literature does the course cover? I don't know if that's for me, but I can answer that. Derek, so I did a module last year which I definitely recommend called, what was it called? Wow, anyway, I was like, I just wrote it to my friend. Oh my God, okay, never mind. It's called African Literature or something like that and you cover so many different books and it's really amazing. And I was just talking to my friend about it, about how your readings for each week aren't, as she would quote, like boring political readings. You get to read like a novel and read literature about written by an African author and it's really enjoyable. So there's like different modules you can do on literature. You can even do, I'm guessing, ones from other courses with your open modules. You don't have to, like even if you're studying African Studies or something very specific, you'll probably have open modules so you can look at literature and languages from other areas of the world. Yeah, does anyone have any other questions? I think there's two that come in that are very similar. How does learning a language in a, what's learning a language in a pandemic like and how has COVID impacted the core? So either of you wanna take those? So I can say briefly and then Alice you can come in. So I think, so all our teaching has moved online and my experience with that has been quite good actually. So what I've done, not so much in the languages but in the thematic courses and actually in the languages I think people do that as well. We have a prerecorded lecture. So I record the lecture and that's available and anybody can watch it at any time and students really like it because they can pause or come back to have a cup of coffee in between and you can do it whenever you like. So you don't have problems with time zones or with work schedule, caring responsibilities. So your social life is completely fine. And then so it's a find that's an hour recorded lecture and then we have an hour interactive seminar. And so that's also online but it means that really there's a lot of student input. So typically there might be like some worksheet, some data we look at or some discussion points. And then there's maybe breakout groups of people going smaller groups, come back plenary. And that has worked very, very well for me. And there's also the assessment, there's mitigation. So for the exams there are now open book exams. So you can take them at home. But I think you have like a day or two to answer the questions. So on balance, I think it works well. For the year abroad we have to see whether we can run that. But what Alice mentioned, we have an arrangement. We try to set that up again with a charity called Chatterbox. And that is group sessions with speakers of the language. And that's also quite exciting because these are not language teachers. These are historically the migrants, refugees, people in this country. So and now it's broader. But essentially these are people from all walks of life. And it's really, really interesting to meet them. It's a little bit like a small year abroad in an online environment. Alice, do you want to follow up on the COVID online? No, I agree with what you're saying. Definitely it's really great being able to watch the lectures. Like I don't have any lecturers that do pre-recorded ones, but they are all recorded so you can watch them after and you can go back to them. If you're writing an essay, you can be like, what did they say and all that stuff. It's definitely really great that it's recorded. Yeah, I found it. Okay, in the pandemic. Lovely, we've got like one moment. If there's any more questions, I'm going to come through. If not, like Professor Lutzer, please put his email down if you want to contact him after the session for any questions that you might have. And I've also just put the link to the language for lockdown. I mean, I think we did that last May or something. It's a bit old, but it's still fun to click through. And there's two Swahili things. I'm not sure if there's, you might have an Amharic as well. But there's lots of other source languages as well. But yes, I mean, you know, Esamani said, please be in touch if you have questions. And also, you know, I think we run more open days in the next couple of months because I think Ida, our Swahili lecturer, well, she will be back as well. And there's Bukola as well. She is West Africa, Yoruba specialist, literature specialist. Yosef does Amharic. So actually it's a much bigger team. It's just today we are, you know, to me, Shikwana and Nha, Nha, Nha, Ugonja. You know, people are unwell. There was different planning issues. So that's what people couldn't make it. But if you come to the next one, which I think there's a series of them, I'm sure you will meet other people as well. And, you know, everybody, I'm sure is happy to talk on the email. Okay, brilliant. I want to thank everyone for coming for our panelists as well. And I hope this has been a really useful session for everyone. Like you said, feel free to contact Professor Litz after if you have anything about admissions in particular, feel free to reach out to our admissions department and they'll get back to you. But yeah, thank you everyone for attending. Very good indeed. Thank you. Asanteenee. Bye.