Sunday, January 17, 2021

First words in Tamil

 


I have visited Singapore's bilingual Tamil and English club several times and having started the challenging task of learning to read and speak and write (Mandarin) Chinese, I thought it was time to tackle another one of Singapore's four official languages, Tamil.

I have used several approaches. 

The most useful for a jolly introduction, individual words and grammar is wikihow. The sentence structure usually has the verb at the end. The verb to be is not necessary. That explains why some Indian speakers create sentences without verbs. 

English - Tamil

I - nan

you -ninkal

he - avar

she - aval

it - atu


Tamil - English

atu - it

avar - he

aval - she

nan - I

ninkal - you

The Foreign Workers & Domestic Helpers language guide has Singapore's four official languages, English, Chinese, Tamil and Bahasa Indonesia, as well as Myanmar, and Bengali - the language of Bangladesh.

I didn't get on with the flashcards from livinglanguage.com/languagedemo/tamilflash

I could not work out the words from the sounds.  Good if you want to speak. I want to understand what I hear and to read. 

This flashcards would be good for me for Spanish and Italian and German where I can work out what they are saying and learn the accent. It worked well for me in Chinese.

Useful Websites

https://www.wikihow.com/Learn-Tamil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_Tamils

https://digitaldefynd.com/best-tamil-language-courses/

https://www.livinglanguage.com/languagedemo/tamilflash/11930/essential-saying-hello

duolingo in January 2021, The Tamil course is 75% complete.


Duolingo 

Languages available

Chinese, German, Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Welsh, Ukrainian

Memrise

Languages available

Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Turkish


Google Translate

memrise

https://www.memrise.com/

Foreign Workers & Domestic Helpers Language Guide

About the Author

Angela Lansbury teacher of English (advanced and English as a Second Language or English as a Foreign Language, French and other languages, aspiring polyglot.


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