This title doesn’t exactly hide that I am going to talk about Wikipedia today. The afaan Oromoo Wikipedia is not a robust Wikipedia. Many topics are missing and many articles are relatively short descriptions. Obviously, this is less good if trying to use the website as an actual way to gain knowledge. But, many of the short articles are easy to digest and understand.
As the articles are often short there is a greater likelihood to see spelling mistakes or the odd thing that doesn’t make sense grammatically. You also run into just poorly written material, duplicated material, and disagreements that are not unknown on the English language Wikipedia, but don’t get fixed because of the lower traffic to the afaan Oromoo Wikipedia.
Of course there are still lots of good things to find and use for practice. Since it was written by people who are often native speakers, you can see different spelling and grammar constructions. With a good grammar book or an above basic understanding of the language you can get through a lot. A good dictionary will also almost always help.
An Example
For example, the lovely city of Jimma has a relatively short entry with the first sentence saying matter of factly. “Jimma magaalaa guddaa kibba-lixa Itoophiyaa yoo ta’u Finfinneerraa km330 fagaatee argama.” Simply explaining the city is found in southwest Ethiopia and how far away from Addis Ababa it is. This sentence is relatively easy to understand with a basic vocabulary but also hints at things like the words Finfinnee and irraa being combined to create the meaning “from Addis Ababa”. You could also look at verb forms such as argama– it is found, which is essentially the passive voice for the verb arguu– to see. Maybe you would be interested in why kibba-lixa has a hyphen, or why it goes with lixa instead of dhiha to mean west.
I really enjoy reading the afaan Oromoo Wikipedia. I often find new words or new ways of using words. It is not perfect. I also am uncomfortable writing my own articles at this time. Maybe in the future, I will start writing but not now. My access to normal books has improved since I first learned afaan Oromoo, and I don’t visit as much as I once did, but the Wiki is still a nice place to learn new words and practice.