South Africa has several languages. English. Afrikaans, which is based on Dutch. Xhosa, the language of Nelson Mandela. Zulu.
I remember when I visited South Africa how impressed I was by people who could speak the native languages, and even speak or understand several of them. As for the click language - amazing! I was impressed that local could speak it, and that any multilingual foreigners could learn to speak the language, or even understand it.
When I started investigating the languages I started with Wikipedia. I was impressed to read that as many as 7 million people spoke Xhosa. The number of African languages even in South Africa alone was daunting.
However, at the end of the Wikipedia was a chart comparing several languages, showing the translation of the opening paragraph from the constitution. The English was on the left. I could see that with my knowledge of a few words of German, and the ability to follow the similar Dutch words, I could see that Afrikaans would be easy to pick up.
The other piece of good news was the similarity of the native African languages. Zulu and Xhosa had several words which were almost identical. Another group of three languages were either similar to the first two, or similar to each other. If you knew one language from home and a second from school. You need only study two more to know 8 languages!.
I learned the clicks from this video. first above. Learn easy it says. I would say learn easily, but never mind, I agree that he made the learning easy. Only three sounds. For three letters. C x and q. Sounding like a horse clopping, tut tutting, and so on.
Their other video taught me the word shap.
I started looking at languages to fulfil my dream of being a polyglot (meaning a speaker of multiple languages) by starting a club for Polyglots.
Click Languages
Practise xhosa sounds with a man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw_hBNyi_9c
Some history and world view from a lady
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