How to get over my fear of speaking Kannada?
The Southern Dravidian language Kannada is predominantly spoken in Southwestern India by the Karnataka state. The other states Kannada is extensively spoken in, include Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Goa, and Kerala. Apart from India Kannadigas are found in Singapore, USA, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Around 56,4 million people, 43 million of them Natives, were found to speak Kannada in a survey.
It is an official language of the Karnataka state and has been known with several names in classical India such as Canarese, Banglori, Havyaka or Kanarese.
In my opinion, if you truly want to get over your fear of speaking any single language, you must try to speak it.
It is totally understandable, to not be able to muster up enough courage to speak in public but at the same time, you can still speak in private without anyone listening to you. Once you’re confident enough you can go out and speak to other natives. To begin with, you need to focus on speaking the right language. Therefore, I suggest that you watch some Kannada movies or watch Kannada videos and try mimicking them. Once you get a hang of the general pronunciation of words and the arrangement of them in every sentence, you can try speaking to yourself.
When you start speaking to yourself, you need to focus on how you pronounce these words as well. For example, you can read a book in Kannada but instead of just reading it in your mind, you can read it out loud. With listening to different videos and movies you should have by now, got a slight hang of every word’s pronunciation, if you haven’t, you can look for educational videos that specifically focus on training their viewers on speaking. Apart from that, you can also listen to Kannada music and slowly start to shadow or mimic them.
Finally, you can also stand in front of a mirror and speak in the Kannada language. With this, you should be able to practise and eventually get over your fear of the language. Once you overcome your fear of this language, you can try to converse with other Kannada speakers. For starters, you can converse with other Kannada students. I suggest conversing with students, simply because they too are in the learning stage and therefore will be much forgiving of your mistakes while speaking. You can also ask for feedback and focus on rectifying those mistakes.
Next up, you can try speaking to your tutor in Kannada, if you happen to have one. Once you have worked on the feedback that you have received from both your fellow students as well as your tutor and you have enough courage to be able to speak to an actual native, it is time to converse with a Kannada native speaker. The speaker will help you understand the right way of speaking and also help you gauge if you are close enough to what is considered to be the right pronunciation of each word in the Kannada language.
Finally,
In some of Indian’s strongest empires, such as Vijayanagara, Chalukya, Rashtrakuta and Hoysala, Kannada was used as the spoken and written language for the day to day court proceedings. The Kannada language uses the Kannada script for writing that evolved from the 5th-century Kadamba script. For about one and a half millennia Kannada has epigraphically proved itself and the literary Old Kannada prospered in the 6th century Ganga and 9th-century Rashtrakuta kingdoms. Kannada has had a continuous literary heritage for more than a thousand years. It’s such a pleasure to learn a language that was leading at a point in time in India. Learn more about Kannada culture and language at Multibhashi.