Yabanya tana girma.

Because this is a normal Hausa sentence pattern. With a noun subject, Hausa often still uses a matching subject marker after it.

So the structure is:

Yabanya + tana + girma

Here, tana agrees with Yabanya and helps show the ongoing/present action. It is not unnecessary repetition.

Because Yabanya takes feminine singular agreement in Hausa.

Hausa nouns belong to grammatical gender classes, and even things that are not female in real life can still be grammatically feminine. For a feminine singular subject, the usual continuous/imperfective form is tana. A masculine singular subject would normally take yana instead.

Only approximately.

In this sentence, tana carries two ideas at once:

• the subject is 3rd person singular feminine
• the action is ongoing or current

So it often lines up with English she is or it is, but it is not a perfect word-for-word match. Hausa does not need a separate word exactly like English is here.

Here, girma is the form used after tana to express the action growing.

A useful way to think about it is:

• English: is growing
• Hausa: tana girma

In other contexts, girma can also be related to ideas like growth, size, or greatness, but in this sentence it is functioning as the action part: to grow / be growing.

The pattern is:

Subject noun + agreement marker + verbal noun/action expression

So in:

Yabanya tana girma

• Yabanya = the subject
• tana = feminine singular subject marker with ongoing/present meaning
• girma = the action

This is a very common Hausa pattern, so it is worth learning well.

Grammatically, tana is the same form you would use for she and for a grammatically feminine non-human noun.

So in English, the best translation depends on what Yabanya refers to:

• if it is a female person, you would usually say she is growing
• if it is a thing, plant, or object, English will usually say it is growing

This is a good example of how grammatical gender in Hausa does not always match natural gender in English.

Yes, if the context already makes the subject clear.

Tana girma by itself means something like She is growing or It is growing, with a feminine singular subject understood.

But if you need to name the thing you are talking about, you include the noun:

Yabanya tana girma.

A rough beginner-friendly pronunciation is:

ya-ban-ya ta-na gir-ma

A few tips:

• g in girma is a hard g, like in go
• r is usually a light tap or flap
• the vowels are usually pronounced clearly, not reduced as much as in English

If you are a beginner, getting the consonants and vowels clear is more important at first than worrying too much about tone.

Not necessarily.

It is capitalized here because it comes at the beginning of the sentence. If it is not a proper name, it would normally be lowercase in the middle of a sentence.