Tamil for Beginners [Paperback]

Kausalya Hart (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Center for South & Southeast; First Edition edition (December 1992)
• ISBN-10: 0614166640
• ISBN-13: 978-0614166644
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,353,773 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Best introduction to Tamil I've seen yet!, March 27, 2000

By 

Amber Rehling (Berkeley, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tamil for Beginners (Paperback)

I highly recommend this book to anyone trying to learn Tamil, especially since any books about Tamil, much less one as well-written as this one, are very hard to find outside of India. Nice aspects include: explanation of alphabet, lengthy and quite useful vocabulary lists, fun easy-to-read stories in Tamil, and lessons that are easy to follow and not too overwhelming. My only hesitations are that the grammar section is not always totally clear (though better than anything else I've seen) and that there isn't anything about spoken Tamil variations, but these are small complaints. Mrs. Hart teaches Tamil at UC Berkeley and this book is her text. I had the pleasure of studying Tamil with her for a year and I made fast progress. I wish the same to anyone else who tries to learn this beautiful and often underappreciated language.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent for classroom learning or self-teaching., April 11, 2001

By 

M. Cauble "ldlakasha" (Cambridge, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tamil for Beginners (Paperback)

This is an excellent book. After years of trying to make sense of the confusing "learn Tamil in 30 days" or similar books one can get in India, I found this book to be very helpful. The only book I have found which comes close to it is the "Microwave Approach" (only sold in India, I believe), which puts more emphasis on the spoken version but leaves out most of the written elements. As to what the other reviewer has said -- my copy of this book has a small section detailing the differences between written and spoken Tamil, but maybe they've changed it since then!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Is this really the best book around?, July 2, 2006

By 

Raman (Pittsburgh) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tamil for Beginners (Paperback)

I'm a native speaker of Tamil. I got this book because I never formally studied in school and my vocaublary 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 occured 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 charactes by now.) There is no translation of these sentences to Englist either. You'll have to do that yourself using the vocubalary section. But before looking up a word, you'll first locate and remove from the words any suffixes such as the ingerrogative 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 excercises 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 teac hteach youthat 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. Excatly 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.