Learn Your First 99 Swahili Words: Greetings, Verbs, Numbers and Noun Classes

Ninety-nine cards is a strange number for a deck called Top 100 Essential Words — and that missing card is a good introduction to how this Flip It deck works. It is a raw, unglossed English→Swahili list: no hints, no example sentences, no noun-class labels. Everything useful is there, but you have to read it the right way.

Deck: Swahili Vocabulary: Top 100 Essential Words (code UE3687, 99 cards, English front → Swahili back).

What the 99 cards actually give you

The full coverage: greetings (jambo, kwaheri, tafadhali, asante), all seven pronouns (mimi, wewe, yeye, sisi, wao), the question words nini, nani, wapi, lini, kwa nini, vipi, numbers moja→kumi, twelve verbs (kwenda, kuja, kula, kunywa, kuona, kusikia, kusema, kujua, kutaka, kutoa, kuchukua, kulala), time words (siku, usiku, wakati, mwaka, mwezi, wiki, leo, kesho, jana), adjectives (nzuri, mbaya, kubwa, ndogo, moto, baridi, mpya), family (baba, mama, kaka, dada, rafiki, familia), body parts (mkono, mguu, kichwa, jicho, sikio, mdomo, moyo), and a short nature and place set (mti, mnyama, ndege, samaki, barabara, mji, nchi, lugha).

The ku- you will have to drop

Every verb is stored in its dictionary form with the infinitive prefix ku-: kusema, kuona, kujua. You never say those bare in a sentence — Swahili glues tense markers to the stem instead: ninasema (I speak), alijua (he knew), tutaona (we will see).

The exception is worth a card of its own: monosyllabic stems keep ku-. kula, kuja, kunywa and kwenda stay intact under a tense marker — ninakula, anakuja, ninakunywa, ninakwenda. Write that rule on the back of those four cards and you have solved the single most common beginner error in the deck.

Two cards to rewrite before your first session

Card 37, "old → kale." Kale means of antiquity, of the distant past (as in zamani za kale). For an old person say mzee; for an old, worn object, kuukuu.

Card 50, "work → kazi." It sits in the middle of the verb block, but kazi is the noun. "To work" is kufanya kazi — literally to do work. Add the verb to the back.

Two smaller notes: moto is literally fire, so hot water is maji ya moto; and ndege is both bird and aeroplane, which is a free mnemonic rather than a mistake.

Tip: make the deck teach noun classes

The deck contains exactly two plural pairs — mtu/watu and mtoto/watoto — and stops there. Add the plural to the back of every other noun card yourself, because in Swahili the plural is a prefix swap, not a suffix: kitabu → vitabu, mti → miti, mkono → mikono, jicho → macho, while nyumba and ndege do not change at all. Ten minutes of editing turns a flat word list into a working introduction to the noun-class system.

Same logic for numbers: 1–5 and 8 agree with the noun (mtoto mmoja, watoto wawili, vitabu vinne, watu wanane), while sita, saba, tisa and kumi — the Arabic loans — never change.

This deck is the starter subset of the larger 500-word list, so expect overlap and suspend the duplicates rather than reviewing both.

Find UE3687 in your library on Flip It.

Keep going: Swahili Vocabulary Study Guide: 500 Essential Words · Swahili Food and Market Vocabulary