Colloquial Tamil: The Complete Course for Beginners

by E. Annamalai, R.E. Asher, Ron Annamalai

Book Overview

Colloquial Tamil is easy to use and completely up to date Specially written by experienced teachers for self-study or class use, the course offers a step-by-step approach to spoken Tamil. While... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415187885
• ISBN13: 9780415187886
• Release Date: June 2002
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Spoken Tamil

This textbook is a good introduction to 'Spoken' Tamil. The emphasis is on the spoken aspect, and not the written aspect of Tamil. It does go over the Tamil alphabet, and teaches some minimal written Tamil. It can be a great start to learning Tamil, however another book would be better to learn the written form of the language after using this book.

Good book, if you know the language a little

This is probably not the ideal book if you have NEVER heard/attempted spoken tamil before. But, if you are familiar with another Indian/South Indian language and want to learn Tamil, this is a good book. There are several very realistic dialogues with English transations that are used as a teaching aid throughout the book. Personally, I have found the book extremely useful, but I have lived in Chennai for 4 years and I can understand most of it. Thanks to this book, I have been able to talk to my mother-in-law in near-fluent tamil in about 4 weeks. Another problem is there aren't too many other Tamil books out there, so by all means, give this a try. Overall, it is a very well written book.

good resource

Though the authors have done a commendable job simplifying a very difficult language, there are several things that could be improved. The course is transliterated in Roman script rather than Tamil. Though useful perhaps for taking a holiday to India, it's not helpful for someone truly interested in learning the language. Also, the audio part of the course is spoken so fast that it's almost impossible for a beginner to grasp the sounds yet alone were the words break. I persistently struggled through it for one year before visiting India and will probably struggle another year since there is there is no other audio instruction available.