You’ve just shifted to Chennai from your hometown, maybe for school, for college, or for your first job. It’s an exciting and overwhelming time by itself. Now you further have to deal with a language barrier that restricts how much you can explain to your maid, or how much you can bargain with shopkeepers or complicates your commute, as you do not speak Tamil. But fear not, I’m here to make your life easier.
Firstly, by being here on this blog you’ve already proven your intention to learn Tamil and that is the first big step towards your eventual fluency in the language. Congratulations on choosing to learn Tamil! On the one hand it’ll connect you with the heritage and history of this vibrant language, and on the other hand if you’ve recently moved to a city in Tamil Nadu, learning Tamil will help you uncover the real local flavour of the city. It will make your experience here not only more convenient but also so much more interesting!
You don’t need to master Tamil grammar straight away
I have seen so many people give up on learning Tamil and in fact any new language before they even start. Avoid this pitfall at all costs! You might think you aren’t good with languages, or that South Indian languages are too different from your mother tongue. Or that there’s no time to dedicate to learning a new language from scratch. However the reality is that with the right guidance, learning Tamil is much easier than you may think. And I’m here to prove that to you. You don’t have to spend too much time on it - a small amount of consistent effort can help you a lot. And if you speak any other Indian language, North or South, you already have a huge headstart in learning Tamil! Our sentence structures are the same, most Indian languages use the same Sanskrit loanwords for many concepts, and the alphabet’s structure is the same even though the symbols are different (ka, kha, ga, gha, etc., for consonants and matra symbols for vowels).
Chill Pannunga - Functional before Fluent
Before you get fluent, aim to be functional in your Tamil learning. There are so many ways in which you can start using Tamil in your daily life from Day 1 - by learning small but useful words and phrases. I’ll get into the details later, but a simple example is the magic of “Pannunga”. You can start using Pannunga as soon as you land in Chennai for everything by just appending it to an English word. “Call pannunga”, “Wait pannunga”, “Bill pannunga”, “Repair pannunga”, etc. The list is unending.
Similarly, knowing a few question words and their respective answer words helps a great deal in dealing with everyday situations:
- Where - Enga?
- Here - Inga
- There - Anga
- How much - Evlo?
- This much - Ivlo
- That much - Avlo
- What - Enna ?
Understand how Tamil is different from your native language
There are some major differences as well as similarities between Tamil and other Indian languages like Hindi. It is good to know which parts of the language you can use your native language’s logic directly, and where you have to learn the logic of the new grammar.
Let’s go through all the ways in which Tamil is similar and different to languages like English or Hindi.
Subject-Object-Verb Word Order
In Tamil, the verb always comes at the end of the sentence. All major Indian languages follow this same Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) Word Order as Tamil, whereas English follows Subject-Verb-Object (SVO). I’ll explain in simple terms.
English: I do Yoga (S-V-O) - Subject is “I”, Verb is “Do”, Object is “Yoga”
Tamil: Naan Yoga Panren (S-O-V) - Subject is “Naan” (I), Object is “Yoga”, Verb is “Panren” (Do)
Hindi: Main Yoga Karta Hoon - (S-O-V) - Subject is “Main” (I), Object is “Yoga”, Verb is “Karta hoon” (Do)
Observe how the Tamil and Hindi sentences line up perfectly. Both end with the verb, whereas in English the verb “Do” comes in the middle of the sentence.
If you already know another Indian language, you can save the mental process of rearranging the sentence in Tamil. The words will fall in the exact same order as in your native language.
If you’re learning through English, you need to adjust your word order. Just remember that the verb always comes at the end of the phrase or sentence in Tamil.
Tamil Diglossia - Spoken Tamil is very different from Textbook Tamil
Next, let’s talk about the diglossia in Tamil - which is just a fancy way of saying there is a big difference between Textbook Tamil and Spoken Tamil. If you pick up a standard grammar book or use tools like Google Translate, you’ll likely see the formal, written version. While grammatically perfect, it is quite different from the natural, casual way people actually speak on the streets of Chennai, or even in movies and TV shows.
For instance, the same example I used earlier that means “I do Yoga” will be translated into formal Tamil as “Naan Yoga Seygiren”. But this is too formal for everyday situations in Chennai.
You can think of it like comparing Shakespearean English to how we speak today, or even Sant Kabir’s poetry versus modern, everyday Hindi. If you’re a new learner of Tamil, I highly suggest you learn the spoken form of Tamil first. And that is what we focus on here at Bhashafy. Bhashafy’s Tamil course is designed to be practical guides to help you actually communicate in Tamil and make your life in Tamil Nadu easier, and not just learn textbook grammar that is disconnected from real life situations.
Tamil uses a lot of suffixes to express meaning
Another massive difference you'll encounter, perhaps the most significant of all, is the central role of suffixes in Tamil.
Tamil is what linguists call an agglutinative language. In simple terms, it relies heavily on attaching various endings to words to change their meaning, often stacking them together in a single sequence.
This logic differs from English or Hindi where Tamil frequently produces impressively lengthy words. Many times just one word in Tamil expresses what would otherwise require a long sentence or even multiple sentences in other languages. The good news is that these suffixes follow a very logical, almost algorithmic pattern that is easy to predict.
To give you an example, the core verb for "do" is Pannu.
In Tamil, you simply attach the suffix -nga to show respect and politeness.
If you want to say "don't," you just use the -aadhe suffix.
Therefore, Pannu translates to "Pannu".
Pannu-nga becomes "Please Do".
Pann-aadhe means "Don't do..."
Pann-aadhee-nga is the polite "Please Don’t Do…"
Notice the logic here? These suffixes stack together like building blocks to expand the meaning of your original verb!
Tamil script - To read or not to read?
The Tamil script is an abugida consisting of around 30 distinct characters (12 vowels and 18 consonants). If you already know Devanagari script or any other Indian script, the logic of the alphabet is exactly the same, just the shapes are different. We have vowels, consonants and vowel matras that attach to consonants.
Now, the big question for a new learner is whether to start by learning to read the script. I highly recommend getting comfortable with the spoken language first, before doubling the complexity with the script. Further, since Tamil is diglossic, the written language does not always match the spoken dialect. Learning the script is a project unto itself, that I believe should be Step 2, after having made progress on Step 1 that is learning spoken Tamil. But the choice is yours. Whenever you feel up to learning the Tamil script, you can refer to the Last Section of Bhashafy’s Tamil Course which uses a unique and highly intuitive method of learning by reading road signs and billboards from real life photos taken in Chennai.
Good luck on learning Tamil!
Now, I think you are ready to begin your Tamil language learning journey. To support your progress, here are some helpful resources:
So vaanga, join me in Bhashafy’s Tamil Course and learning materials where we dive into the essential building blocks of the language in a simplified and structured manner that you will be hard pressed to find anywhere else! Many thanks, or as we say in Tamil, Nandri.
