Here is a simple gloss:
gida – house, home
→ a gida = at home / in the house
kullum – every day, always
da – with / have here, so muna da ≈ we have
ƙarami – small
→ abu ƙarami = a small thing
ko – or
babba – big
→ abu babba = a big thing
So a very literal reading is something like:
“At home always we-have thing small or thing big that we-are using with it.”
Hausa does not have definite and indefinite articles like English “the” and “a/an.”
So a gida can be understood as:
The idea of “the” is simply understood from context; you do not add a separate word for it. If you wanted to be more specific (e.g. “in our house”), you could say a gidanmu (in our house), but the basic a gida already works for “at home.”
Yes, the order can change, and both are natural:
The meaning is practically the same. The difference is just in emphasis:
Hausa word order is fairly flexible with adverbs like kullum, especially at the beginning of a sentence.
Hausa often uses a structure that literally means “we are with X” to express possession:
So muna da abu literally is we are with a thing, which functions as “we have a thing.”
Other persons:
In your sentence, muna da is best understood as “we have.”
Abu is a very general noun meaning “thing” or “something.”
In this sentence:
So abu on its own is quite vague, like English “thing.” If you want to emphasize “some (unspecified) thing,” you can also say wani abu (some thing / something), but here abu ƙarami ko abu babba already gives the idea of “some small or big thing.”
Both patterns exist in Hausa, but they’re slightly different:
abu ƙarami
ƙaramin abu
In everyday speech, ƙaramin abu is probably more common if you mean simply “a small thing” as a unit, but abu ƙarami is also grammatical and understandable. The same applies to:
Ko is the normal conjunction for “or.”
You’ll see ko used in questions and statements:
So here it simply connects the two possibilities (small thing / big thing).
No, that first da is different. In “da muke amfani da shi” there are two separate da’s:
da (right after abu babba)
da (in amfani da shi)
So:
The da in muna da (we have) is yet another use: there it means “with” in a possession sense (we are with X → we have X). So you’re seeing three functions of da in one sentence.
After the relative marker da (meaning that/which), Hausa normally uses the “-ke” forms (also used for focus). So:
Pattern with another subject:
So da muke amfani is the standard relative continuous form:
da (that) + mu (we) + -ke + verb.
Amfani is a verbal noun meaning “use, using.”
Da here is the preposition “with / by means of.”
Shi is a pronoun meaning “it / him” (masculine singular).
So:
In Hausa, when a relative clause refers back to something (here abu, thing), it is very common (and often required) to repeat that reference with a pronoun inside the clause. That is why you get:
The shi refers back to abu. Since abu is grammatically masculine in Hausa, the pronoun is shi, not ita.
Normally, no—you would not end the clause with da alone. You need something after the preposition da, and here that “something” is the pronoun shi referring back to abu.
You could rewrite the sentence to avoid the pronoun, but then you’d change the structure, e.g.:
But as the sentence stands, the shi is needed.
The combination of:
gives a habitual / regular meaning in context:
In Hausa, the continuous form (muna) plus an adverb like kullum is often used for regular, repeated actions or states, not just something happening “right now.” So it’s more natural to understand it as habitual (“we always/usually have”) rather than a one‑time “we are having (right now).”