Workbook

đź‘‹ I ni ce! Welcome to Volume I of the Workbook.
(Looking for Volume II? You can find it here.)

This virtual workbook contains interactive exercises to help you practice and reinforce what you’re learning in the Beginner Bambara Course.

Each section below corresponds to a course unit. Chapters are named by topic, with short notes about the type of exercises included.

You can also use this workbook for extra practice or review at your own pace.

👇 Jump to a unit to get started. An ka taa!

Chapters

Unit 1 | "Hi! My name is..."

Unit 2 | "I'm a student"

Unit 3 | "I speak Bambara"

Unit 4 | "Speak slowly"

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 KantĂ©, 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.