Teach yourself Tamil: A Complete Course for Beginners

Tamil is a very important language in the region covering South India and Sri Lanka. It is spoken by about 72 million (2011) native speakers in the state of Tamil Nadu in South India, and in Sri Lanka about 24% of the population speak it as their first language. Tamil has attained the status of a lingua franca in a vast geographical expanse extending from the Middle East to the Asia.The author of this book, is a linguist who has thoroughly mastered the structure of the Tamil language.A noticeable feature of the Tamil language is that in many instances there is a striking difference between the written form and the spoken form. The author through hard research has discovered a set of rules that help the student to convert the written form into the spoken form. All these rules are presented at appropriate contexts for the benefit of the student.In this book the author has shown how to decline all the Tamil pronouns. He has shown that all the Tamil nouns are grouped into 10 groups, and has shown how they are declined.The Tamil verbs are divided into two groups, i.e, regular verbs and irregular verbs. The author has taken great pains to show very clearly how all these verbs are conjugated.In Tamil, as in the other languages of the region, the verbs appear very often in their participle forms. In this book the author shows very clearly how these participle forms are obtained for any verb group. Any foreign student who wishes to acquire a sound basic knowledge of the Tamil language should know how to obtain these participle forms once the verb group is mentioned.The phonetic alphabet designed by the author shows very clearly how every Tamil word appearing in this book is pronounced.This book consists of 30 lessons, a Tamil-English basic vocabulary (mini dictionary) and an English-Tamil basic vocabulary (mini dictionary), printed over 633 A5 Pages.Any ardent student who studies the Tamil language through this book will surely attain a high degree of proficiency to read, write and speak the Tamil language.The author of this is a B.Sc. (Physical Sciences) and M.A. (Linguistics) degree holder of the university of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. In all he has written and published six elaborate and extensive books (ranging from 633 to 1200 A5 Pages) in Sinhala, Tamil and English to learn Sinhala, Tamil, English, Hindi and Urdu.Email: lionel.silva@hotmail.comFacebook: A.W.L Silva Read more