Jana niliona panya mdogo jikoni, na nzi wengi walikuwa wakiruka karibu na takataka.

Jana is a time word meaning yesterday. It is very common to put time expressions at the beginning of a Swahili sentence to set the scene.

It does not absolutely have to come first. You could also say Niliona panya mdogo jikoni jana. Putting jana first just sounds very natural when you are opening the sentence with the time.

Niliona can be broken down like this:

• ni- = I
• -li- = past tense
• -on- = the verb root see
• -a = final vowel

So Swahili often packs subject + tense + verb into one word. That is why there is no separate word for I here unless you want extra emphasis.

This is a very common question. In Swahili, some nouns can look the same in singular and plural. You often tell the number from the agreement words around them.

Here:

• panya mdogo is singular because mdogo is singular
• nzi wengi walikuwa is plural because wengi and wa- in walikuwa are plural

So the surrounding grammar tells you the number, even when the noun itself does not visibly change.

In Swahili, adjectives normally come after the noun they describe.

So you get:

• panya mdogo = mouse small
• nzi wengi = flies many

This is the normal Swahili pattern. For an English speaker, it can feel reversed at first, but it is one of the most basic word-order differences to get used to.

This is because animal nouns in Swahili often take animate agreement.

Even though words like panya and nzi do not look like the typical m-/wa- nouns, they are usually treated grammatically like animate beings. So you get forms such as:

• mdogo = singular animate agreement
• wengi = plural animate agreement
• walikuwa = plural animate subject agreement

That is why the sentence uses wengi and walikuwa, not the inanimate-style forms you might expect from the noun shape alone.

Jikoni is a locative form meaning in the kitchen or at the kitchen, depending on context.

The ending -ni often marks location in Swahili. It can correspond to English ideas like:

• in
• at
• sometimes to

So jikoni is a very natural way to say in the kitchen.

This is a compound tense used to express an ongoing action in the past.

• walikuwa = they were
• wakiruka = flying / in the process of flying

Together, walikuwa wakiruka means something like they were flying.

So Swahili is using one verb to set up the past state (were) and another form to show the continuing action (flying).

The difference is similar to English were flying versus flew.

• walikuwa wakiruka gives an ongoing or background action: they were flying around
• waliruka would sound more like a simple completed action: they flew / they jumped / they took off, depending on context

In this sentence, the longer form fits better because it describes what was going on around the trash.

Karibu na means near or close to.

So it functions as a set expression:

• karibu na takataka = near the trash

This is worth learning as a chunk, because karibu by itself can have other meanings too in different contexts.

Swahili na can do more than one job.

In this sentence:

• the first na joins two clauses and means and
• the second na is part of karibu na, meaning near / close to

So it is the same word form, but it is doing a different grammatical job.

Usually takataka is best understood as a collective or mass noun meaning trash / garbage / rubbish.

So instead of thinking Is it singular or plural?, it is more natural to think of it like English trash or garbage, which also do not always behave like ordinary count nouns.

Swahili does not have articles that work like English a/an/the.

So a noun like panya can mean a mouse or the mouse, depending on context. The same is true for nzi.

If a speaker needs to be more specific, they can add other words, such as demonstratives, but Swahili normally does not require an article the way English does.

The sentence uses a very natural order, but Swahili word order is fairly flexible, especially with time and place phrases.

Here the sentence starts with a time expression, then gives the main event, then location, then adds a second clause. That is very normal. But Swahili can move elements around for emphasis more easily than English can.

So this sentence is natural, but it is not the only possible order.