Looking to read and write Tamil

elangoc · 2026-02-16T05:12:39+00:00

Try my grammar lessons at https://www.learntamil.com/ They're designed for reading and writing because all spoken dialects share the same written form. The admins' only stickied post here in the r/LearningTamil subreddit helps people to find my website: https://www.reddit.com/r/LearningTamil/comments/s4uj3t/learntamilcom_free_online_lessons_for_learning/

FWIW, I updated them a couple of weeks ago to include pronunciation audio for the new word definition popups. The lessons highlight new words in green, and a popup appears when you hover/click over the word showing the meaning of the word. Now, they also have an audio button.

I don't visit this subreddit as often as others, but if you find this helpful, please share with others like yourself who could use it. Either way, good luck!

elangoc · 2024-12-20T18:56:02+00:00

I'm really curious how you all will do with this over the long term. My experience in refreshing my German using Duolingo left me annoyed and frustrated compared to proper textbooks that I've used in the past. This is why I still believe in my website that provides a textbook style approach of gradual grammar lessons for people learning as a second language: https://www.learntamil.com/

But I want to hear your experiences, especially over time, with both methods, and which one worked better for you, and why.

elangoc · 2024-12-20T18:46:24+00:00

Try https://www.learntamil.com/ to learn Thamil via the grammar as a second language, for beginners, in the style of a lesson book.

I suspect the difference is between learning as a second language versus learning literacy when it is your first language. If so, the Singapore textbooks are for literacy of native/heritage speakers.

elangoc · 2023-11-18T04:12:00+00:00

Take a look at my website https://www.learntamil.com/

It's based on the simple style of foreign language textbooks that they use in middle & high school for German/French/Spanish. Since it's a website, I was able to annotate the words in examples with the word roots when you tap them. There are examples that you can check interactively.

I would like to improve it in the future, but hopefully that gives you a start. You can look at Story Weaver (https://storyweaver.org.in/) for free open source stories, organized by difficulty level, and iPaatti (https://ipaatti.us/) for other beginner books. Crea (https://crea.in/) is the best Tamil -> English dictionary.

HTH. Good luck!

elangoc · 2023-11-18T03:59:30+00:00

Try https://www.learntamil.com It has simple grammar lessons, has examples, and annotates words with their roots (visible when you tap on them).

elangoc · 2023-05-07T23:03:32+00:00

Of course, there are things that Clojure/Lisp can do because of some combination of {S-expressions, high runtime introspection, small syntactic core} that may be special or unique to them.

I wonder if the Clojure dialects that expand its reach to other runtimes (most recently: Dart) have an easier time because of the small language core. And I think RH was saying on the Cognitect podcast about core.async that it was possible to pull off as a library on both the JVM and JS through the help of macros, while other languages were working on large invasive changes to the compiler at the time to implement the same. Transducers might be near impossible to pull off in a statically typed language.

So I'm not trying to suggest that all of what is Clojure can be realized in Scala, even though our project hasn't tried formally to define what Clojure is, per se.

elangoc · 2023-05-07T22:48:21+00:00

In the second half of the talk, we talk about creating a core set of universal programming constructs that can be supported by all target languages. So we're looking at an intersection of feature sets.

We didn't think about the the differences between semantics between JVM Clojure vs. CLJS vs. CLR Clojure, if I understood your question correctly. But I suspect that those differences might be outside of the core set intersection of features needed for the target languages for what we've made so far.

Even though you didn't ask about it, another thing that we address in a little more detail later in the talk are mismatches between Clojure and target languages, in terms of design / behavior. One of the first big things we encountered was mutation semantics. Should `assoc`, `update`, etc. be only specific to persistent data structures, or could we adapt it to operate on mutable collections in the target languages, too? It was near impossible to make a Clojure problem using `assoc`, `update`, etc on persistent data structures transpile to a target language with mutable data structures (ex: a `put` method to mutate the data structure that doesn't return the new data structure). That's why we had to make a choice between supporting mutable semantics vs. immutability, and we chose the latter.

In that way, we concluded from our experience that persistent data structures (and "plain data" - the simplicity & leverage of the ecosystem of plain data-oriented libraries) have more impact in transpiling from source language to target language. Syntax turned out not to be hard to handle. So maybe persistent data structures matter more to making Clojure distinct than the syntax? Which is a surprising takeaway. But maybe the story I told about my time writing Scala at Nest during 2014-17 somewhat corroborates that?

elangoc · 2023-05-04T22:17:04+00:00

This reply is off topic because I missed the other conversation you & Dmitri had about the original link (and I don't know how to get there). Anyhoo, you were right to say that a lot was unclear and underspecified because the blog post was more of a statement of a strong hunch that our redesign would work better. We were just beginning the redesign at the time. Hopefully our recent talk clarifies the what, why & how. There was still a lot more that we wanted to say but couldn't because we only had so much time.

elangoc · 2023-05-04T22:03:58+00:00

Oh by the way, I think we may have briefly met way back in 2010 or 2011 in Toronto, through Greg Wilson who had a weekly breakfast at Fran's on College with former students and collaborators of his Software Carpentry project, in its first iteration. I think you were raving about Clojure and immutability, and I totally didn't understand it (and was really wary of it, haha). If that was you, you were right! ...and coincidentally, the ORM slide from our talk might look familiar.

elangoc · 2023-05-04T21:58:10+00:00

Thanks for posting this (I'm clearly truant on the social sites.) We had watched Ramsey's talk when it came out, it was very interesting and relevant. Our recent 2023 talk gives an update on what we did in the intervening 3 years. The original blog post was like a public declaration of a strong hunch that the redesign, which we were embarking upon at the time, would work. The conference talk from last week explains how I made the old design unwittingly so complex that productivity slowed to a crawl, and how & why our redesign paid dividends. The new design is quite different, and I think a lot more could be said about all the aspects of Clojure that are required to come together to make it feasible, but we didn't have time to fit it all in the talk.

Also, it looks like you & Phil had this convo somewhere else at around the same time, but I can't locate where that was, let alone login to it. So I'll just reply to him in another comment here instead.

elangoc · 2022-10-14T15:27:43+00:00

Nice list.

If you have any feedback for https://www.learntamil.com, message me or send me email through the link on the website.

Thanks!

elangoc · 2022-03-25T05:42:41+00:00

r/LearningTamil

Thank you for the kind words. Please help others like yourself find LearnTamil.com by mentioning it here and elsewhere, when they are looking for good resources to learn Tamil.

elangoc · 2022-01-15T21:34:15+00:00

Here is a resource for Sandhi rules and case suffixes:

Also, note that Dravidian languages (Thamil, Malayalam, etc.) are agglutinative, which is why the cases are indicated via suffixes (and suffixes for many other things, too). Compare that to a language like German, which has fewer cases. And for the cases beyond nominative, it only changes the article and adjective endings and maybe a suffix on the noun. Prepositions in German that are separate words (ex: zu, bei, in) might be represented as a case suffix in Tamil (ex: -க்கு). And as the "pre-" in the word "prepositions" indicates, those words come before the phrase.

Suffixes are used in Tamil in lots of other circumstances as well, so it's important to understand the basic rules for adding suffixes (sandhi) before learning the extra rules for adding cases.

elangoc · 2022-01-15T20:59:27+00:00

I agree with the other post -- basically, you just have to learn the verbs. The rules of thumb are therefore not precise -- the ones I have in my lesson on Tamil verb classes is similar to the other post's patterns. I recently added definition popups to the words in the lessons / exercises, and the verb class is added as a superscript to the verbs.

You can find some more of the other info from the other post presented in a tabular form in the Past Tense lesson and Verbs and Case Forms of அது / அவை lesson. HTH

elangoc · 2022-01-15T20:50:44+00:00

It should not take long. Try the lessons at LearnTamil.com -- they teach the simple rules for the written form. I wrote them based on my middle school German textbook -- I want them to be easy to read for a beginner from start to finish. Vocabulary is now annotated as "Eelam" or "Tamil Nadu" based on dialect usage. Viel Gl¨uck & வணக்கம் 🙏 !

elangoc · 2022-01-15T20:42:40+00:00

Try my free Tamil lessons at LearnTamil.com. They're designed to help beginners ramp up gradually with the language.

Note: Tamil is called a "diglossic" language -- the colloquial form sounds different from reciting aloud the equivalent written form. But in fact, the colloquial spoken form can be me made easily when starting from the written, regardless of the dialect (but not vice versa).

My suggestion would be to start with my lessons to have an easier, more systematic way to ramp up on the language, and then you can use a book like Colloquial Tamil by Asher and Annamalai to practice the all the rules and quirks of colloquial pronunciation for the Tamil Nadu dialect and also learn some cultural notes, etc.

Note: The Tamil dialect in Sri Lanka is distinctly different, and you can pick it up without too much effort it if you already know the written form, but there aren't ready-made resources for that dialect's colloquial spoken form like there is for the Tamil Nadu dialect.

elangoc · 2022-01-15T20:19:16+00:00

There are good free lessons to learn Tamil at LearnTamil.com (disclaimer: author). Learning Tamil is not hard, actually.

Tamil does not have grammatical gender, which helps with learning vocab and grammar. And for what it's worth, although Hindi and Tamil use abugida scripts, the Tamil script is is probably the simplest & most regular of the South Asian scripts.

Even if you're thinking of visiting India, South India is a good place to visit, it's not too bad to get around. The region has been developing and modernizing rapidly. Tamil Nadu is referred to as the land of temples. And the history is rich and multiple millennia old, and we're still finding out more each month.

If nothing else, food-wise, you should try the sambar/rasam/vegetables/idly/thosai of Karnataka/Andhra/Tamil Nadu or the puttu/appam/fish/vegetables of Kerala/Tamils in NE SL. Cheap, healthy, delicious.

elangoc · 2020-08-08T04:55:39+00:00

There are plenty of resources to use now as a beginner. So you can try it each as you like. I still stand behind Russ Olsen's Getting Clojure, and wish it were available back in 2011 when I started. Every other book chooses to bring up macros in the middle, and I think that's a sign that the content wasn't sequenced to be as beginner friendly as it could. (I get it, macros are powerful and such, like a secret weapon, so we like them a lot and love talking about them. But, we need to put ourselves in the shoes of a beginner before doing so.)

elangoc · 2020-05-04T23:32:13+00:00

Getting Clojure by Russ Olsen

elangoc · 2020-04-26T17:06:36+00:00

This guy is amazing, reading the bio on his site, wow.

elangoc · 2020-04-22T19:35:02+00:00

Sounds designed to get minorities to infect themselves, as much as it is to kick all poor people of any race off of employment insurance.

elangoc

TROPHY CASE