Tamil for Beginners

Probably better for someone not trying to learn on their own but has tons of good examples and lessons

Referring to Vols. 1 and 2 As a tamilian-american born and raised in the US, I was looking for a self-study book for learning to read and write tamil as well as for improving my spoken tamil and vocabulary. I am fairly fluent in colloquial tamil. Therefore, I was also particular that the book did not solely focus on the more authentic tamil currently found on TV news and other media. For my purposes, this book is superb! It provides crystal clear explanations of the types of letters and their sounds. The rules to combine letters (sounds) are also very clearly explained. There are, of course, some typos and certain exceptions to some of the rules are missing. However, these are very few in number. Ms. Hart has done an amazing job of distilling the structure of the language into a relatively small set of rules that, for the most part, capture all there is to know in order to be intelligible. In my experience, native speakers rarely have enough grasp to accomplish this, regardless of the language. The section on grammar rules is quite comprehensive but may require the reader to be familiar with some grammatical terminology not often stressed in American schools. Some of this terminology may have only been introduced to the typical american student when he/she first takes a foreign language and usually this terminology is not emphasized. However, refamiliarizing oneself with this is not too difficult. The dictionaries at the end do contain many commonly used words and can prove useful. All in all, the book certainly is excellent in helping me accomplish my goals. Highly recommended!!!

I'm a native speaker of Tamil. I got this book because I never formally studied in school and my vocabulary is very limited. The introduction goes over the vowels, consonants and how to write conjunct characters. There are a few typos but it's written in a way that would suffice for most people. I was able get along with this book but it occurred to my that if you don't already know some Tamil you would be very frustrated. This is what I mean... Every lesson follows the same format: a conversation (in Tamil), a vocabulary section (with English meanings of Tamil words) and exercises. There is little or no grammar in each lesson. For that you'll have to look at part 2 of the book. Consider Lesson 1 for example. It begins with a conversation written in Tamil with no phonetic translations. (You are expected to have leaned to read the characters by now.) There is no translation of these sentences to English either. You'll have to do that yourself using the vocabulary section. But before looking up a word, you'll first locate and remove from the words any suffixes such as the interrogative suffix -a (for yes/no questions) or the suffix -um which means 'and'. the rules for adding the suffixes are not explained. Needless to say you have to figure out lots of rules yourself just to understand a simple conversation. The exercises in lesson 1 want you to convert a few sentences into the negative and to form yes/no questions but the lesson doesn't teach you that. It doesn't even teach you that the word order is Sub-Obj-Verb, which you need to know to do the exercises. I wonder if this book was originally written for native speakers to be used in Indian schools. Well, it's pretty unfortunate that this is considered the best book around. Exactly who benefits from this book? You might.. if you already speak the language somewhat and can read the script. Otherwise, if you have studied several foreign languages extensively, have a good background in linguistics and would like to take the challenge of learning a new language on your own.

This book is more suitable for young Tamil children who already speak colloquial Tamil (their mother tongue) and need to learn the written Tamil (also known as Classical Tamil, which was last time updated in the 13th century). It's not really suitable for foreigners who want to be fluent in colloquial Chennai Tamil (the variant used in Kollywood). On the other hand, it's a good book for those interested in Southern Tamil (including Jaffna Tamil), because their speech is closer to the written variant.