English & Shona Phrasebook
Words R Us English & Shona Phrasebook
This is not your typical tourist phrasebook. It contains over 75 categories of terms in Shona and English with over 4,000 terms, phrases and sample sentences. Also included is a guide to the English and Shona alphabet and pronunciation.
The English & Shona Phrasebook is designed to be used by the English speaker to learn the basics of the Shona language or for a Shona speaker to learn the basics of English.
Shona or ChiShona is one of the 16 official languages of Zimbabwe and is native to 80 percent of Zimbabwe’s population of about twelve million people. The language is fairly uniform throughout the country and local dialects are mutually intelligible. The Shona ethnic identity is provided from the local dialects, namely Karanga, Zezuru, Manyika, Ndau and Korekore.
The written form of the Shona language dates back to the 1830s when the missionaries visiting Zimbabwe decided to put the oral form of the language to written form. The initial aim was motivated by the need to translate the bible into local languages.
The term Shona emanated around 1930 when a government phonetician recommended that all the local dialects should be unified into a single language.
The majority of the people in Zimbabwe are bilingual in Shona or Ndebele and English. Ndebele is also a Bantu language and is spoken by about 20 percent of the population, mostly in the western and south western parts of Zimbabwe. The government also officially recognizes five minority languages: Shangana, Venda, Nambya, Tonga and Kalanga.
English is the official language used in education, administration, justice, trade and commerce.
If you are intending to learn any new language, you’ll need to get a phrasebook. The purpose of the phrasebook is to give you practice in real-life situations. Memorizing phrases ahead of time is the BEST way to use a phrasebook. Your grammar book, and sometimes even your course, does not give you the "Which room is mine?" kind of phrases. Yes, you will need to flip through the book to find responses or the next question on a different topic, but that is only if you do not practice a bit ahead of time. You can't beat this book - for the price and the small, yet concise and relevant content. Learn how to tell time, order food, go through customs, as well as greetings and social conversations.
Proper names may or may not be translated between languages. Generally country names are translated, but personal names, place names, and trade names (products) are not. Some words may provide an alternate translation or transliteration, others may not.
This phrasebook is derived from our Words R Us system, a derivative of WordNet. English Wordnet, originally created by Princeton University is a lexical database for the English language. It groups words in English into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides brief definitions and usage examples, and records a series of relationships between these sets of synonyms. WordNet can be viewed as both a combination dictionary and thesaurus.
