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Luganda is a Bantu language of the African Great Lakes region. It is spoken by around eight million Baganda people, mostly in central Uganda, as well as by a further one million who use it as a second language.
It is the most widely spoken language of Uganda, and it is the third most commonly learned second language there after English. It is also closely related to several other languages in the area.
One major feature of Luganda is that it is a heavily agglutinative language, meaning it makes use of a range of affixes to build more complex words. It is also tonal, with high, low and falling tones, something that makes it quite tricky to master for speakers of English or other non-tonal languages.
It is not a common language for English speakers to study, so there are very few materials available if you want to learn it – which means this free online Luganda course will be one of the only options you can turn to in you are interested in trying.
Course Details
What is the FSI Luganda Basic course?
The FSI Luganda Basic course consists of 94 lessons that each begin by presenting new language, mostly in the form of sentences, before explaining them and then practising them through drills. This is slightly different from most other FSI Basic courses in that this course doesn’t contain dialogues to read or listen to.
The 94 lessons that make up the bulk of the course are preceded by a section dealing with the tones of Luganda, one of the more challenging aspects of the language for many learners.
As well as this, there is a separate “pretraining” course of 20 hours, which also deals with the pronunciation of Luganda. This is intended to be completed before starting the tones section and the rest of the main Basic course.
Unfortunately, none of the audio that is supposed to accompany these courses is currently available, which makes the material more difficult to use, especially if you have no other study materials to refer to.
If I am able to locate the audio recordings in the future, I will upload them to the site to help anyone trying to study this language.
How was FSI Luganda Basic originally used?
FSI Luganda Basic was originally developed for US diplomats who needed to learn the language before being sent to parts of Africa where Luganda is spoken. They would have studied the program intensively, with around six hours of class time per day, supplemented by a further two hours of personal study.
In class, they spoke only Luganda, and they were even encouraged to speak Luganda among themselves in their free time. In this way, after only a short time, they were able to master the language to a relatively high degree.
How can you use FSI Luganda Basic?
Since the recordings that are supposed to accompany this course are missing, the material here will be of limited use unless you already know some Luganda and have mastered the basics of Luganda pronunciation.
However, if you have another coursebook or other resources, you could work through the text of this free Luganda course to deepen your knowledge of the language while enlarging your vocabulary.
Taking it further
It doesn’t matter how good your study resources are, you’ll never be able to learn a language if you don’t practice. For this reason, as soon as possible, you should take your new Luganda skills out into the real world to put them to the test.
Try to find native Luganda speakers to practice with, and above all, do everything you can to make using Luganda a part of your daily life. Because when you do, you will see how much progress you begin to make in this seldom studied language.