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Hindi for Tamil | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| adoggie Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6535 days ago 160 posts - 159 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese* Studies: German, Russian, French | Message 1 of 12 06 July 2010 at 8:29am | IP Logged | ||
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How much will knowing Hindi help me in learning Tamil? I need to learn Tamil for a medical trip to India, and think that learning Hindi first, since there are more Hindi learning materials available, will be a great help.
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| MäcØSŸ Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5811 days ago 259 posts - 392 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2 Studies: German | Message 2 of 12 06 July 2010 at 9:36am | IP Logged | ||
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If you’re really interested in Tamil and not in Hindi, I think you should start directly with Tamil.
Hindi has borrowed heavily from Persian, while Tamil is the “purest” dravidian language and has very few Indo- Aryan words, so you will not find many cognates in the two languages. Grammatically they’ve got little in common, since Hindi is manly fusional while Tamil is agglutinative. Edited by MäcØSŸ on 06 July 2010 at 9:36am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Talairan Tetraglot Senior Member Spain Joined 6594 days ago 194 posts - 258 votes Speaks: Afrikaans, English*, Gypsy/Romani, Dutch Studies: Spanish, Flemish, Galician, Aramaic | Message 3 of 12 06 July 2010 at 9:39am | IP Logged | ||
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Hindi belongs to a completely different language family (Indo-European as opposed to Dravidian), so knowing Hindi will be of virtually no help in learning Tamil. Some of the vocabulary may be similar, having been borrowed from Sanskrit.
A useful starting point is always Wikipedia. There are some resources out there for learning Tamil. Routledge have Colloquial Tamil, Hippocrene have a phrasebook and dictionary. Assimil have one with a French base (also available directly from Assimil). If you are going to be spending all (most) of you time in Tamil Nadu, then I would say it is better to concentrate on Tamil only. If you will be travelling around northern India, then Hindi may come in useful (map of area where Hindi is spoken: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hindispeakers.png. Of course, English is widely spoken, with most of the educational system using English as a medium. Edited by Talairan on 06 July 2010 at 9:40am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Petitanne Triglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5326 days ago 19 posts - 29 votes Speaks: French*, English, GermanC1 Studies: Spanish, Latin, Arabic (Written), Hindi | Message 4 of 12 06 July 2010 at 11:35am | IP Logged | ||
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I totally agree with above. Hindi and Tamil are totally different. In India, people who speak Tamil and people who speak Hindi talk to each other in English....
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| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6231 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 5 of 12 06 July 2010 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | ||
Sorry, but if you want to learn Hindi for Hindi's sake ( and its own merits)... learn Hindi. Hindi is not going to help you much in Tamil Nadu or any of the other southern states. In fact the anti-Hindi sentiment in Tamil Nadu throughout the latter half of the 20th century led to the passage of India's Official Languages Acts of 1963 and 1967, ensuring the continued use of both English and Hindi as bi-official languages of India. The long and the short of it is that in the South, the people seem to prefer English to Hindi. Anti Hindu Agitations of Tamil Nadu I have not been there, but I am told by fellow travelers that if you attempt to speak Hindi in Tamil Nadu, you will be answered in English. Languages of India It is true that there are not many good resources for Tamil. There is , of course, the Colloquial Tamil course as mentioned above. If you are serious, take a look at this course. It is designed for Special Forces agents who need an intensive "crash" course in Tamil.. cmd=ViewItem&pt=US_Nonfiction_Book&hash=item5193399b28#ht_14 14wt_1135">Tamil course on ebay and then there's always this one Through/dp/8187782048/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278439 982&sr=8-2">Learn Tamil There are no reviews, but for 2 bucks used it can't hurt to check it out! If you do decide to study Tamil seriously - you probably aren't going to learn it from a course. Find as many Tamil speakers as you can to practice with! Use skype or any of the other online tutoring methods and speak with native Tamil speakers as much as possible. This will be key. You don't want to step off the plane in Chennai and have that be the first time you try out your Tamil. The last thing you want to make sure is that they do actually speak Tamil where you are going. In Andhra Pradesh they speak Telugu. In Karnataka you need Kannada and in Kerala you need Malayalam! Good luck! Edited by liddytime on 06 July 2010 at 8:38pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| adoggie Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6535 days ago 160 posts - 159 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese* Studies: German, Russian, French | Message 6 of 12 07 July 2010 at 5:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the help. I will learn Tamil first for my trip, and then learn Hindi after that out of interest. It's great that they speak English in India so pervasively, otherwise I might need to resort to drawing pictures on a dry-erase board.
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| Adamdm Groupie Australia Joined 5439 days ago 62 posts - 89 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Dari, German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written) | Message 7 of 12 07 July 2010 at 7:59am | IP Logged | ||
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My language-learning aim is to attain at least some ability in representative languages of the major language families of the world.
I have made varying amounts of progress in several of these, and, for the others, am collecting learning materials. Tamil is one of the languages on my list, as the major representative of the Dravidian family, and also, according to one estimate that I have read, the 7th most spoken language in the world. It is also the domestic language of a wide Tamil diaspora. I am struck by the extreme paucity of material for learning Tamil, relative to the importance of this language. Tamil learning material is absent from the language sections of almost all the bookshops that I have seen, and, in one that has some, it is very little. "Colloquial Tamil" is the only major modern Tamil course that I have seen. There is material aimed at expatriate Tamil children being taught their native language (and mostly this is getting them to be able to read and write a language that they probably know to speak in their homes), but, appart from Colloquial, and one very very small booklet "Learn Tamil through English", the only other stuff that I have found is late 19th century British Empire publications (both as reprinted books from Indian publisher Asian Educational Services, and available online as scanned .pdfs of old printings). Quite good for what it is, but the vocabulary is necessarily very dated, and, without a very patient native-speaking teacher, learning an extremely unfamiliar foreign language without audio recordings is (in my opinion) an impossible task. As for written material to read, and recordings to listen to, there is heaps where I am (Sydney Australia), in the form of newspapers, books in libraries, video recordings etc., as well as plenty of Tamil speakers. However, there is a huge distance from where I am now, to even being able to start to comprehend any of this material, and, as for people, these expatriates are all competent English speakers, so for communication purposes with them, any Tamil language that I might acquire would be redundant. One Tamil friend of mine expressed such (I felt negative) surprise that a non-Tamil would be interested, when I asked him a question about the Tamil alphabet, in the early stages of my investigations, that (together with other things noted above), I am coming to the conclusion that Tamils generally don't want outsiders learning their language. On the other hand, perhaps there is just hardly any interest from outsiders to learn it. Tamil does not appear in the list of languages on the home page of this forum. I have been led to believe that Tamil is a language with a great and ancient literature, and I can see for myself that it is thriving in the modern world as well. So why then is it much easier to find good & up-to-date learning/teaching material for Tamil-as-second-language, than it is to find for much more obscure and limited languages? I am thinking of trying to find a Tamil speaker with whom to make a Pimsleur-modelled set of recordings, but I know that this would be a very big ask, and I would need to get soemone who had some sympathy for the motivations of someone who would want to learn something for no apparent practical outcome. Thoughts on this topic from forum members would be much appreciated. Edited by Adamdm on 07 July 2010 at 8:03am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6231 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 8 of 12 07 July 2010 at 12:46pm | IP Logged | ||
That would be awesome!! Rather than use the Pimsleur template, I would recommend this course Conversational Tamil for Peace Corps It would give a much better background and vocabulary than the typical Pimsleur "do you want to have a drink at my place?" There is another book, An Intensive Course in Tamil with 24 cassettes (no CDs) Rs.1080.00 but as far as I know you have to order it from India http://www.ciil.org/Main/Publications/audio.htm I also ran across some great additional websites for Tamil!! UPenn Tamil Learn Tamil Textbook Tamil through English Tips for Learning Dravidian Languages 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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