 So I got back from Air Force Field Training a couple days ago and I was trying to brainstorm some video ideas because I have a couple days free before I head back to campus and I was kind of reflecting on the summer and I came up with this idea and I think it should be pretty good video so stick around. Alright what's up guys it's Josh for Backing In with another video. Like I said today's video is going to be a little bit different because I'm going to be talking about a topic I've never really talked about on this channel and that is kind of language learning and how that kind of ties in with my experience this summer. I spent two months this summer in Tanzania and Kenya on an Air Force Language Program so it's this program called Project GO, Project Global Officer where they can send Air Force RTC cadets on trips to learn critical language skills. In this case I was learning the Swahili language which is the language that's spoken in most of East Africa. So I was there for over 60 days and we had Swahili class almost every single day. The only days that we didn't have Swahili class were the days that we were traveling and even then we were trying to have conversations with our teachers while we were in the van or the bus or wherever we were. A lot of times like for the first couple weeks class was literally like four hours a day of Swahili and then gradually it kind of got less and less as we got more busy and began traveling more throughout the program. Our teachers were actually pretty cool because for the first half of the program our teacher was actually a native Kenyan from Nairobi and then as we got into the second so the first half the program was in Tanzania and then as we moved into Kenya we actually picked up two more Swahili tutors who were also Kenyan and they were great as well provided more extra conversation practice. To kind of preface this video I knew absolutely no Swahili going into this program like literally nothing. Before the program they sent me a little sheet of like stuff that I should study before I get there because we did have a quiz on the first day but it was it was super basic stuff. It was like Hobari Zaleo or Gina Longu Nijosh you know like your basic like day one stuff that you need to know and it picked up pretty quick. So before the summer started I kind of thought of it as kind of a challenge. It was kind of cool to start fresh on a brand new language that I'd never studied before because French after studying for like seven years kind of just really dragged on and it was kind of cool just to completely start something fresh. I kind of wanted to track my progress and see how much I could learn in the two months that I was there when I started from absolutely zero. So obviously before I left I did do I did use a little bit of like Duolingo and other apps but Duolingo really isn't great for Swahili to be honest. A lot of the translations don't match up because Swahili doesn't have like a lot of the articles and other words that English has so a lot of times you get incorrect translations which was kind of frustrating but I also just use the the giant package that they sent us to learn and because Swahili really like Google Translate is not very effective at all for Swahili when it comes to like giving the words that you need so you really just need a Swahili dictionary or like a book that explains it really well. So I'll kind of give a little comparison between Swahili and the other language that I know French. So French in a lot of the romance languages kind of one of the hardest parts of the language is the different tenses and the irregularities between these tenses like French alone like just the past tense is a very complex tense because it's two parts and some verbs if you want to say in the past tense take a certain verb and some take another and with those different verbs some of the past participles are irregular as well and all these different tenses are conjugated different ways and although most of the tense constructions are very mechanical there's a lot of irregularities whereas on the Swahili side I literally learned the past the present the future and the conditional tense all within the first week because they're very simple to construct and there's barely any irregularities except when it comes to like monosyllabic verbs the hardest part about Swahili which is actually the easiest part about most of the other language I'm familiar with is nouns like you learn a noun in French and that's the way it is like it may have a masculine or feminine form and that kind of changes the way that the adjectives are but in reality it's it's pretty simple whereas Swahili has noun classes whereas like French would just have masculine or feminine Swahili has like nine different noun classes which are which completely changes the way that the grammar is constructed for these different nouns so like your demonstrative pronouns your possessive pronouns the connectives like all these different things change depending on which noun class you're in and some of the noun classes are pretty self-explanatory like the the MWAT class is just it's people animals and insects so it's pretty easy to determine that it's in that noun class but then you have the other noun classes like GMA or like in class which literally it's just random verbs you kind of have to when you learn a new verb you have to memorize which noun class it goes into in addition to learning all the grammar for every single noun class so that's that's kind of the hardest part for Swahili I would say so I've come pretty far and learning the language in only two months I like I said I really wanted to dedicate my summer to learning this language and kind of see how far I could grow starting from absolutely zero and I made a lot of really good progress at the end of the summer as part of the project go program you have to take something called an OPI which is basically a it's a phone call and it's a verbal Swahili assessment that's ran through the Air Force and the Department of Defense to kind of see how far you've grown in the language and kind of give you a give you an assessment so they kind of grade you on a scale from like zero one one plus two two plus three three would be considered like a pretty advanced speaker someone who's not like natively fluent but somebody that's that's good enough to speak the language and talk about some complex topics whereas one is just like your basic stuff and two is somewhere in between I actually ended up scoring a two on the exam after only two months of Swahili prep so I was able to talk about some more complex issues like the politics and the economies of Tanzania and Kenya and the different problems that these countries face in Swahili which was pretty cool so to kind of demonstrate a little bit of how much I've learned I'm actually going to attempt to talk about myself for a minute or two in Swahili I'll probably put subtitles at the bottom so you guys can actually understand what I'm saying just to kind of demonstrate how much I've actually learned this summer because it's it's honestly wild so let me begin This is Africa Mashariqi This is Post-Sopharian Africa Mashariqi because we are in Zanzibar and we are going to come here to meet and meet and we are going to meet Serengeti and we are going to meet Simba, Twiga and Pundamalia and we are going to to meet and we are going to meet and we are going to meet and we are going to meet and we are going to meet and we are going to meet and we are going to meet and we are going to meet and we are going to meet and we are going to meet and we are going to meet and we are going to meet and we are going to meet and we are going to meet and we are going to meet to talk about myself. That was just off the top of my head. I hope that was good. Overall, the experience in East Africa and learning Swahili was incredible. And I was very surprised by just how in depth and how much this program really changed my views on things and allowed me to connect with people all the way across the world. And I never thought that, I don't know, I kind of wrote the program off. I didn't know how good like an ROTC language program was gonna be because I'd already done like a Yale study abroad program, but sorry Yale, but this program was miles beyond anything I had in Paris last summer. And it was completely funded by the Department of Defense and the military, so it's great opportunities for anyone that sets an ROTC cadet that wants to study a critical language, especially because I started from completely from scratch. Like they actually let me join the program when I knew the Swahili and half the people there didn't know any Swahili. Like it was about half and half newbies and returners. So as I said in my little Swahili blog, I do think I want to continue studying Swahili. I'm not sure how my schedule is gonna work out at Yale this semester yet, but I really kind of fell in love with the language. And since it's a critical language and it actually will serve me well in my future career in the Air Force, I think I do want to continue studying it. I feel like there's a lot of benefits to doing so over like French. Honestly, like after my study abroad in French I didn't want to take any more French where Swahili came back and I'm really pumped and excited and I kind of want to keep taking it, which I guess is a good sign. So that's about it for this video. Hope you guys enjoyed me telling my story about how I tried to learn Swahili in two months and I think I did a pretty good job. Let me know. Let me know what you guys thought of this video down below. I know it's kind of strange and not a normal type of video that I would do, but let me know what you thought in the comments down below. If you're excited that I'm back and pumping out more content, drop a like because that helps me in supporting the channel a lot more than you think. If anyone's new and somehow found this video because Swahili was in the title or language learning or something along that, feel free to subscribe. I post a lot of different stuff on this channel and this is just one little aspect of my life. So with that, I hope you guys enjoyed the video and I'll see you next time.