Zinariya tana da tsada.

A helpful word-by-word breakdown is:

• Zinariya = gold
• tana = it is / it has in a feminine singular form
• da = with / having
• tsada = high price / expensiveness

So the whole sentence literally comes out something like Gold has expensiveness, which is how Hausa expresses Gold is expensive here.

Because that is a normal Hausa sentence pattern. Even when you name the subject with a full noun like Zinariya, Hausa still usually uses a matching subject marker before the rest of the predicate.

So Zinariya tana... is not seen as unnecessary repetition. It is standard grammar.

Because zinariya is grammatically feminine in Hausa. Hausa nouns belong to gender classes, and the agreement word has to match that gender.

So:

• feminine singular noun → tana
• masculine singular noun → yana

This is grammatical gender, not biological sex. Even things like gold can be grammatically feminine.

Tana is the 3rd-person feminine singular imperfective form. For a beginner, you can think of it here as a present-time form.

In this sentence, it does not mean something awkward like is being expensive. With a general quality like this, it is best understood simply as is.

Here da means something like with or having. Hausa often uses subject + tana/yanа + da + quality to express a description.

So tana da tsada literally means it has expensiveness / it is with expensiveness, and the natural English meaning is it is expensive.

In this sentence, it is better to think of tsada as a quality word meaning high cost / expensiveness. Hausa does not always match English parts of speech exactly.

So instead of trying to force it into the English category adjective, it is more useful to learn the whole pattern tana da tsada = is expensive.

Normally, no. In this sentence, da is an important part of the construction.

If you leave it out, the result will not sound like the standard way to say Gold is expensive in this pattern. So for this sentence, keep da.

Hausa usually does not use articles in the same way English does. A bare noun like zinariya can simply mean gold, with the exact sense understood from context.

So Zinariya tana da tsada naturally works as Gold is expensive without needing a separate word for the or a.

A simple beginner-friendly pronunciation is:

tsa-da

The ts sound is like the ts at the end of cats, but here it comes at the start of the syllable. So try saying ts cleanly as one unit, then add a-da.

You can say the full sentence roughly as:

zi-na-ri-ya ta-na da tsa-da

You can say:

Zinariya ba ta da tsada.

That means Gold is not expensive.

Notice that tana changes to ba ta in the negative, while da tsada stays the same.