Workbook

I ni ce! Hello! Welcome to Volume I of the Basic Bambara Workbook.

It's a virtual book of audio and written texts with exercises to help you practice Bambara/Jula.

It started out as a collection of assignments to help private lesson students practice and go beyond the grammar and vocabulary covered in the Basic Bambara YouTube series and, later, Grammar Manual.

Most the chapters have been integrated into the full Beginner Bambara Course. But note the presence of some additonal ones that are there for extra practice!

(You can find Volume II here.)

Chapters

Unit 1

Unit 2

Unit 3

Unit 4

Details on the audio recordings

Some of the audio files from this Workbook are derived from two public domain textbooks that were financed by the US government:

  • Ronald W. Long and Raoul S. Diomande, Basic Dyula: Grammatical Outline and Introductory Exercises. (Intensive Language Training Center: Indiana University, 1968).

  • Charles Bird, John Hutchison, and Mamadou Kanté, An Ka Bamanankan Kalan: Beginning Bambara. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University African Studies Center, 1977).

To make the audio useful for modern usage via the Internet, I have substantially “reworked” it in various ways, such as:

  • I segmented digitizations of the original audio tapes into smaller individual files (so that specific segments of the original tape could be easily listed to without needing to scroll or cue up a specific moment in the timeline)

  • I cleaned, edited and removed unnecessary pauses of the smaller segments for a better and more realistic listening experience

Additionally, I have transcribed each audio segment into modern Latin-based Manding orthography that deviates from the original found in the textbooks.