Kannada is one of the world’s oldest languages, besides Prakrit, Tamil and Sanskrit It’s known as Kanarese or Canarese. One of the Dravidian languages of South India, it is primarily spoken by Kannadigas in Karnataka and neighbouring states such as Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerela. It is not only a part of the 22 scheduled languages of India but it has also been honoured with the title of being one of the Classical languages of India. It is the second language to have bagged the highest number of Gyanpeeth awards. Kannada language is devoid of silent letters unlike English and is therefore also termed as a scientific language that has been heavily influenced by the Sanskrit language.
Let’s now see if you can really learn Kannada in the course of the summer.
Every language has four different skills that an individual is expected to master in order to truly be proficient in the entire language. These four skills are speaking skills, reading skills, writing skills and listening skills. Out of these reading and listening skills tend to be the easiest to master for any student and writing and speaking tend to give a tough challenge to the same student. An individual is expected to contribute an immense amount of time, effort, dedication and money in order to master any language. These four skills take a lot of time to master. They cannot be mastered overnight. And hence a single language cannot be mastered overnight. With that said, it doesn’t mean that an individual cannot master a single skill in a short period of time. Now let’s address the language of Kannada. This is a popular South Indian language. It is definitely a historic and one of a kind language. Such a rich language, in my opinion, cannot be learnt in the course of a single summer. Such a language requires extreme dedication, time and a lot of effort. Even if you were willing to dedicate a lot of effort, you still end up falling short of the time. But as previously mentioned, you can still focus on achieving fluency in at least one or two skills. You can club the skills together depending on your comfort and master the skills at the same time. For example you could try mastering listening and speaking together or reading and writing together or reading and speaking together or listening and writing together. Whichever suits you, you can opt for that option. While you definitely cannot master a language like Kannada in the course of a single summer, you can definitely speak a decent amount, or maybe read a decent amount, or maybe you can even understand a decent amount.
Finally,
The oldest literary works in the epigraphs show that Kannada thrived during the 6th century AD, Ganga Dynasty and 9th century AD, Rashtrakuta Dynasty. The Jain Bhandar, Mudbidri palm-leaf manuscript from Dhavala, is the oldest preserved manuscript in the Kannada language that contains texts on 1478 leaves.