Haya tana da tsada.

In Hausa, it is normal for a sentence with a noun subject to include a subject/agreement marker before the rest of the predicate.

So the sentence breaks down like this:

• haya = rent
• tana = a 3rd-person singular feminine marker
• da tsada = with expensiveness / expensive

So tana is not redundant. It is a regular part of Hausa sentence structure.

Because haya is treated as a feminine singular noun in Hausa.

Hausa has grammatical gender, so the agreement marker must match the noun:

• yana = masculine singular
• tana = feminine singular
• suna = plural

Since haya is feminine singular, tana is the correct form here.

Here da is part of a very common Hausa pattern used to express qualities and states.

Very literally, tana da tsada is something like:

it has expensiveness

But natural English translates that as:

it is expensive

So in this sentence, da helps form the meaning be expensive, even though its more basic sense is often with or part of a have construction.

Hausa does not always use a separate word exactly like English is.

In this sentence, the structure tana da ... does the job that English expresses with is. So instead of a one-word copula like English is, Hausa uses a different grammatical pattern.

That is why Haya tana da tsada is the normal way to say Rent is expensive.

For a beginner, the easiest way to understand tsada here is:

• in meaning: expensive
• in structure: more like expense / high price / expensiveness

That is why Hausa says da tsada rather than using a simple English-style adjective pattern.

So you can safely translate it as expensive, but it helps to know that the Hausa structure is a little different from English.

It can mean either, depending on context.

Hausa does not have articles that work exactly like English a/an/the. So haya may be understood as:

• rent
• the rent

The situation or previous conversation usually makes the meaning clear.

If you want a noun phrase rather than a full sentence, you would usually say:

haya mai tsada

That means expensive rent.

So:

• Haya tana da tsada. = Rent is expensive.
• haya mai tsada = expensive rent

The first is a complete sentence. The second is just a noun phrase.

You can say:

Haya ba ta da tsada.

That means:

Rent is not expensive.

Notice the pattern:

• affirmative: tana da
• negative: ba ta da

So tana changes form in the negative construction.

You can ask:

Haya tana da tsada?

or more explicitly:

Shin haya tana da tsada?

Both mean:

Is the rent expensive?

Adding shin makes it more clearly a yes/no question, but in speech the intonation can also do that.

Yes. This is a very common Hausa pattern.

For example:

• Motar tana da kyau. = The car is nice / beautiful.
• Yaron yana da tsawo. = The boy is tall.
• Littattafan suna da nauyi. = The books are heavy.

So a useful pattern to remember is:

noun + agreement marker + da + quality word

That pattern will help you understand many basic Hausa sentences.