Friday, June 5, 2020

How To Learn A Foreign Language. Compare English and Tamil Sentence Structure

You can learn languages many ways.

I like to learn a language like a child starting with a nursery rhyme or song.

As an adult, the best way is to start with simplified grammar. A sentence starts with a noun, the subject, then a verb, then the object. Not necessarily. that's just English. At school I learned Latin, amo, amas, amat. I love, you love, he or she loves. A lot of languages are like that. I just discovered tamil. Take a look.



I have read through the Wiki entry on the Tamil Language and tried to simlify it.
Tamil verbs are inflected through the use of suffixes. A typical Tamil verb form will have a number of suffixes, which show person, number, mood, tense, and voice.
  • Person and number are indicated by suffixing the oblique case of the relevant pronoun. The suffixes to indicate tenses and voice are formed from grammatical particles, which are added to the stem or root.

  • Tamil has two voices. The first indicates that the subject of the sentence undergoes or is the object of the action named by the verb stem. The second shows that the subject of the sentence directs the action referred to by the verb.
Tenses
  • Tamil has three simple tenses—past, present, and future—indicated by the  word endings (suffixes), as well as a series of perfects indicated by compound suffixes. 
Articles
Tamil does not have articles. Definiteness and indefiniteness are either indicated by special grammatical devices, such as using the number "one" as an indefinite article, or by the context. In the first person plural, Tamil makes a distinction between inclusive pronouns  nām (we),  namatu (our) that include the addressee and exclusive pronouns nāṅkaḷ (we),  ematu (our) that do not.]Traditional grammars of Tamil do not distinguish between adjectives and adverbs, 
Verb position in sentence
In the Tamil language the verb comes at the end of the clause (called head final). A typical word order is subject–object–verb (SOV).  German and Japanese also end sentences with the verb. 
But the word order in Tamil is flexible. Tamil has postpositions rather than prepositions.  Modifiers come before the noun. Subordinate clauses precede the verb 
No Subject Word Needed
Tamil is a null-subject language. Not all Tamil sentences have subjects, verbs, and objects. For example, a sentence may only have a verb—such as muṭintuviṭṭatu ("completed")—or only a subject and object, without a verb such as atu eṉ vīṭu ("That [is] my house"). 
No Verb To be
Tamil does not have a linking verb equivalent to the word is. The word is included in the translations only to convey the meaning.
Now you can see why somebody whose first language is Tamil might struggle with English sentence structure.


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www.mightyminds.sg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_loanwords_in_other_languages
Tamil Bilingual speakers' club in Singapore

About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.
I and my family have lived in the UK, Spain, the USA and Singapore. I am a trave writer and phtographer and teacher of English A level and English as a foreign language.

Please come to a Toastmasters International Club where the English clubs have a langauge evaluator or grammarian.  We also have French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil and other language clubs based in Singapore and many more online around the world which because of Covid-19 are now meeting online.

I am President (2019-2020) of Braddell Heights Advanced Toastmasters International speakers' club, meeting every Wednesday, on zoom the first Wednesday of the month but the other Wednesdays are workshops on app learncool.sg
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