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Dravidian family | ||
Tags: India | Linguistic relationships | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes  Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 1 of 4 31 December 2010 at 9:44pm | IP Logged |
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Anyone with experience learning these languages from an Indo-European language background? How difficult are
they when compared to other difficult families such as Semitic languages or the CKJ languages of East Asia? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6230 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 2 of 4 01 January 2011 at 2:58am | IP Logged |
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I have not tried to study them in any great depth, but from my fleeting curiosity dabbling with them I would say
they are EXTREMELY difficult. Much more so than Arabic, Mandarin or Japanese which I have studied. Tamil, for example, has 2 completely different registers for spoken and written speech ( similar to Arabic) , They are highly inflected and agglutinative which produces some incredibly complex words , The scripts are nearly impenetrable. There are, I believe, over 240 letters in the Tamil syllabary! They tend to be spoken very fast and are difficult to understand Lastly, I have been told by South Indians that Westerners, more often than not will be addressed in English even if they attempt to try out the state's native language. If you'd rather not take my word for it , this is what Robert Lindsay, a noted linguist, says on his article entitled: More On The Hardest Languages To Learn – Non-Indo-European Languages http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2009 /12/01/more-on-the-hardest-languages-to-learn-non-indo-europ ean-languages/ Malayalam, a Dravidian language of India, was recently rated the hardest language of all to learn by the World Language Research Foundation. Malayalam words are often even hard to look up in a Malayalam dictionary. For instance, adiyAnkaLAkkikkoNDirikkukayumANello is a word in Malayalam, but I’m not sure what that means. It is composed of many different morphemes, including conjunctions and other affixes, with sandhi going on with some of them so they are eroded away from their basic form. There doesn’t seem to be any way to look that word up, or to write a Malayalam dictionary that lists all the possible forms, including forms like the word above. It would probably be way too huge of a book. Tamil, a Dravidian language, is probably close to Malayalam in difficulty. Tamil has an incredible 247 characters in its alphabet. In addition, as with other languages, words are written one way and pronounced another. Both Tamil and Malayalam are very hard to pronounce and have complicated scripts. Malayalam and Tamil are rated 5, most difficult of all." That being said, if you are truly interested in the Languages, who cares if they are "difficult". Your interest will carry you through where most people without a true interest will give up and say it is "too hard". I put off learning Hungarian for many years because people told me it was so "hard". Guess what?! I actually found it pretty easy!! Edited by liddytime on 01 January 2011 at 3:02am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Dr. Daneeka Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5108 days ago 6 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 4 01 January 2011 at 3:11am | IP Logged |
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In the DLI's difficulty scale, which rates languages on a 1-4 scale with 4 being the most difficult for a native English speaker to learn and 1 the easiest, Tamil is ranked as a 3. This is the same as Amharic, Thai, and Russian, to give you an idea. These rankings are pretty accurate, at least from the experiences that I've had with them.
I hope that helps. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Nudimmud Groupie United States Joined 5193 days ago 87 posts - 161 votes Studies: Greek, Korean | Message 4 of 4 03 January 2011 at 8:14pm | IP Logged |
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I've dabbled a bit with Telegu, so I would by no means call myself an expert on Dravidian. But from my observation, the languages are agglutinative and quite regular so that while the grammar is involved, it doesn't feel as arbitrary as, say the French verb conjugations with their myriad of exceptions. The vocabulary borrows extremely heavily from Hindi, and to a lesser extend from Arabic and Persian, through Hindi/Urdu.
There are a number of downsides to the an English language learner however. - Difficultly finding quality learning materials. My Telegu text book and tapes took 3 months to arrive from India. The cassette tapes were clearly second hand and their cases had been smashed in transit, though miraculously the tapes themselves all played perfectly and the audio quality wasn't bad, especially considering that it was cassette tape. (No CDs available) In addition the audio was for a previous edition of the text so it didn't match the printed dialogues. - A large number of consonants sounds that either don't occur in English or aren't distinguished, e.g. retroflex consonants, aspirated/unasperated, voiced/unvoiced in various combinations (in fact in theory almost all combinations.) - Complex syllabic script. - Difficulty finding native materials such as DVDs with subtitles, books, etc. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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