Hausa greetings can last longer than the conversations they introduce. You ask how the other person slept, how the family is, how the work is going and whether they're tired, they ask you the same, and only then does anyone get to the point. If you want to learn Hausa, start right there. The greetings are your first real conversation, and they teach you the sounds, the rhythm and the manners at once.
After the greetings, the work has three parts. Vocabulary comes faster than you'd expect, because Hausa has borrowed freely from Arabic and English. The grammar has one trick worth learning early: tense lives in the pronoun, not in the verb. And the tones matter in speech but don't appear in ordinary writing, so you learn them by ear. Half an hour a day gets you through the greetings in a week and into simple sentences within a month.
Where Hausa is spoken
Hausa is the main language of northern Nigeria, in cities like Kano, Kaduna, Katsina, Sokoto and Zaria, and of southern Niger, around Maradi and Zinder. There are long-established Hausa-speaking communities in Ghana, Cameroon, Chad and Benin too. Across much of West Africa it also works as a language of trade. It's the first language of tens of millions of people and a second language for tens of millions more. Standard Hausa is based on the speech of Kano.
If your work takes you to Lagos or the southwest of Nigeria, the language around you will be Yoruba, not Hausa. They aren't related, and one won't help you with the other.
Family, alphabet and the tones you can't see
Hausa belongs to the Chadic branch of the Afroasiatic family, which makes it a distant relative of Arabic, Hebrew and Amharic. You won't notice that at beginner level. The Arabic you will notice comes from loanwords, such as littafi (book), and from much of the vocabulary of religion.
It's written in the Latin alphabet, known as boko, with a few extra letters: ɓ, ɗ, ƙ and ʼy. For ɓ and ɗ you pull air slightly inward as you make the sound; ƙ is a "k" with a sharp pop. An apostrophe marks a catch in the throat, as in a'a, "no". An older Arabic-based script, ajami, is still in use too, mostly in religious and traditional writing.
Hausa has high, low and falling tones, and its vowels can be short or long. Neither tone nor length is marked in everyday writing; only dictionaries and textbooks show them. Two words that look identical on the page can differ only in their melody, so whenever you can, learn a new word from a person, a film or the radio, not only from the page.
How to learn Hausa grammar, easy part first
The pleasant surprise is how little the verb does. Tense and aspect sit in the small word before it:
- Na zo. "I came."
- Ina zuwa. "I'm coming."
- Zan zo. "I'll come."
Learn those three patterns with a dozen common verbs and you can already say a great deal.
The less pleasant parts: Hausa has grammatical gender, masculine and feminine, and it shows in pronouns as well as nouns. Yaro is "boy" and yarinya is "girl", and "you" is kai to a man but ke to a woman. Plurals are famously irregular: yaro becomes yara, mota (car) becomes motoci, and littafi becomes littattafai. There's no single rule worth memorizing at this stage. Learn every noun with its plural, as a pair.
The greetings, properly
Here is the core of a Hausa greeting exchange. The answers are fixed and positive, so you can be exhausted and still say Ba gajiya.
- Sannu. "Hello."
- Sannu da zuwa. "Welcome."
- Ina kwana? "Good morning", literally "How did you sleep?" The answer: Lafiya lau, "Fine."
- Ina gajiya? "How's the tiredness?" The answer: Ba gajiya, "No tiredness."
- Na gode. "Thank you."
- Sai gobe. "See you tomorrow."
Rushing past these to get to business comes across as rude, so practice both sides of the exchange until it flows.
Why Hausa courses are hard to find
Hausa has more speakers than most European languages, yet you'd never guess it from a bookshop shelf. For decades the people learning it from English were mostly academics, missionaries, aid workers and journalists, so the materials were written for them, and many are academic in tone and decades old. Some universities in the US and the UK teach it. Look online for ways to learn Hausa for free and you'll mostly find phrase lists and scanned PDFs, usually without tone marks, while apps that cover it at all are few.
A four-week plan
- Week 1: sounds and greetings. ɓ, ɗ, ƙ and ʼy, the catch in the throat, and the greeting exchange above. Say it out loud every day, playing both roles.
- Week 2: pronouns and aspect. The na, ina and zan patterns with a dozen verbs: Na tafi, "I left"; Ina tafiya, "I'm going". Add kai and ke, and use the right one.
- Week 3: nouns and numbers. Twenty nouns, each with its gender and plural. Numbers one to ten: ɗaya, biyu, uku, huɗu, biyar, shida, bakwai, takwas, tara, goma. And the market question you'll use most: Nawa ne?, "How much is it?"
- Week 4: real input. Fifteen minutes of a Kannywood film from Kano or a Hausa radio program, twice in the week, without expecting to understand much. Write five sentences a day about your life.
If you're studying alone, our guide to learning a language on your own shows how to turn a plan like this into a weekly routine you'll keep.
Learn Hausa online with Qlango
The Hausa course in Qlango covers A1 and A2. Be clear about what that is: a beginner foundation, enough to greet people properly, introduce yourself, handle simple everyday situations and read short, simple texts. You pick the language the course is taught through, usually English for readers of this page. The lessons are short. Flashcards with spaced repetition bring words back right before you'd forget them, which is exactly what those irregular plurals need, and writing your answers yourself gets the hooked letters into your fingers. With Premium, the AI teacher will explain the difference between na zo and zan zo, or why the plural of yaro isn't "yaros", whenever you ask. You can start for free; the languages page shows every course and level, and Premium covers the rest.
Learn Sannu, Ina kwana and Na gode today, then do the first A1 lesson. Tomorrow morning, greet someone properly, at full length.
