Amharic lessons

The first thing a child learns in kindergarten is the alphabet. In many parts of Ethiopia that means the fedel. "Hu, hoo, hee, ha, hey, hi, ho"

Since I have been trying to learn the language myself, beginning when I was first in Ethiopia five years ago, I decided learning how to read the language would be a huge step in learning to speak it. I am not convinced I have improved any, but I do impress many of my Ethiopian friends. Whatever the case, I am now teaching Zeru how to read and write in Amharic, so I am sharing some of our lesson pages... maybe just for your curiosity, or maybe, just maybe you will gain an interest in a unique language from a country you may never see!

 My "hu hoo hee ha" lesson posted above is my own unique assosciation Zeru helped me to create so he could remember the order of the letters and what they looked like. Within about two lessons he memorized the row of letters and the sound order of the entire alphabet! (Amharic has twenty-some-odd sets of letters, each set containing seven letters- each letter being a vowl variation of the set: duh, doo, dee, dah, day, dih, doe for example.)