Namkelekile!

For this year’s Mandela Day and the Trading Live Mandela Week organised by Rhodes University Community Engagement, the awarenet team offered their services for a IsiXhosa lesson. With Mcvay as a native speaker and Kjetil being fluent, we decided to take up the challenge and teach the guys from the Department of Human Kinetics and Ergonomics some basic IsiXhosa. All of us had lots of fun trying out the different clicks and showing off whatever we had picked up before. For us, it was quite the experience to teach adults for a change – don’t even think they would be more behaved in class: I thought the learners would be reserved and hold back. But I was wrong, the learners were very active and eager to learn. This motivated me, and I believe the awarenet team too, to do something like this more often. It was an interesting experience.”

image (1)

“I think our little isiXhosa course was a success, me and Mcvay worked well as a teaching pair”, concludes Kjetil. “Mcvay covered the phonetics and I did the basic grammar. The guys from Rhodes said afterwards that they thought of asking us to do the same kind of short IsiXhosa course with their new postgraduates at the beginning of next year. If that’s not a good feedback then I don’t know!” 

image (2)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *