Gori Girl

Hi all.

I am in an intercultural relationship and am learning Tamil as a result. If anyone needs any Tamil resources, here is my main list:

The University of Pennsylvania has two pages, one is an older version with audio clips, the other is a newer version with video and transcripts to follow:

This is an English/Tamil/Sinhala dictionary that pronounces a number of the words

Learn Tamil Through English (lots of downloadable pdf lessons)

A downloadable grammar book

The government of Tamil Nadu has made public all of the public school textbooks, so although they don't teach a foreign language learner per se, they are useful study aides.

The Tamil Virtual University page can be hard to maneuver, but there is a good deal of free downloadable texts there too.

I am currently working on a blog which is pretty minimal right now, but eventually I am hoping to make it into a source for Tamil grammar information (which is relatively hard to find online right now).

So, I did learn the written language because I can't imagine speaking a language and being illiterate.  It would drive me crazy! It only took about a month of not tremendously serious studying to get it down.  The hardest part for me so far is that the written form and the spoken form of Tamil is more drastically different than any other language I have ever seen. In English, and Spanish, you speak less formally than you write, but in Tamil, the written language seems to have changed very little whereas the spoken language has changed overtime. Resulting in some cases, totally different pronunciations and spellings of words (if you were to write the spoken language down).