What can I do every day to improve my Tamil skills?

Tamil is a traditional and one of the most important Dravidian language families. Tamil is one of the classics of the family. Spoken mainly in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore, Tamil speakers in numerous other nations have smaller communities. It was the 18th most spoken language since 1996, with more than 74 million people all over the world. It is one of India, Singapore, Malaysia and Sri Lanka’s official languages.

 Similarly, the language of Tamil has all the four different skills including, listening skills, speaking skills, reading skills and writing skills. All these skills need to be practised and mastered in order to master the Tamil language. If you have made up your mind on improving these skills, then you’re already a step ahead of most others. To improve your listening skills in Tamil, develop the habit of listening very carefully to what others say. When people talk during a conversation, you need to take note of all the different and unique vocabulary that they use as well as the complex phrases that they seem to know.

Along with this, you can listen to Tamil music while doing your daily chores, watch Tamil movies on a movie night with English subtitles and listen to a podcast on a topic that interests you in Tamil. Moving on to speaking skills, once you have gotten used to listening to others, it’s only natural that you will try to imitate them. Just like a child imitates what it’s parents do, a learner tends to imitate what professionals do. And it’s a good thing. Shadowing is one of the best techniques of being able to speak and write. If you’ve taken note of all the important pronunciation and grammar used,  then speaking skills should not be as tough to master. All you need to do is focus on speaking in every way possible. Now we move on to reading skills.

Reading skills is pretty simple and can be done at any point of the day. For reading skills I suggest, you try gathering all sorts of literary resources. Read all sorts of literature available to you in Tamil. And practice reading on a daily basis. If you’re on your way to a meeting and read a newspaper, switch out to reading a Tamil newspaper. If you are writing a research paper, then switch out to reading all the information in Tamil. We finally move on to writing skills which are considered to be the toughest to master in every single language. In my opinion writing skills are not actually as tough as people make them out to seem. In fact I believe that writing skills are quite similar to speaking skills. You can shadow and copy other people and things, and practice every single day until you are confident enough to finally write on your own. Similarly, writing skills requires you to practise every single day. I do not suggest going a single day without practising Tamil writing.

Tamil has an unbroken literary tradition over two millennia and is one of the few living classical languages. Tamil is highly diglossic in nature. The classical language also forms an essential part of Tamil-medium education, for example in elementary school teaching verses from the Tirukkural, a classical work. The ordinary form of the modern language, by contrast, has undergone major changes insofar as someone who has not learned the higher literary form is difficult to see. Multibhashi offers some great Tamil classes. Click here to know more.