Haya tana da tsada.

The rent is expensive.

Breakdown of Haya tana da tsada.

• da: to have
• tsada: expensive
• ta: she/it
• haya: the rent; rental

Questions & Answers about Haya tana da tsada.

Why is there a separate word tana after haya? In English we just say Rent is expensive.

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.

Why is it tana and not yana?

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.

What does da mean in this sentence?

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 or part of a construction.