Colloquial Tamil: The Complete Course for Beginners

by R.E. Asher, E. Annamalai

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 emphasis is placed on colloquial spoken Tamil, you are given a useful introduction to formal speech and the written language as well. What makes Colloquial Tamil your best choice in personal language learning? By the end of this rewarding course, you will be able to communicate confidently and effectively in Tamil in a broad range of everyday situations. Audio material to accompany the course is available to download free in MP3 format from www.routledge.com/cw/colloquials. Recorded by native speakers, the audio material features the dialogues and texts from the book and will help develop your listening and pronunciation skills.

Genres: Language

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Pavan Bharadwaj]

Coming from someone who has tried out all sorts of fast-learning methods like Michel Thomas and Pimsleur for other languages, this book takes the cake in terms of converting a minimally experienced to a beginner/intermediate.

The entire book is in English, while taking pains to ensure all the sounds of Tamizh are captured, with the script being gently introduced.

Also included are highly useful appendices, which are crucial for this language as introducing a word requires additional suffixes to go along.

Highly recommend it as part of a first course, in fact. Most of all, the book can be read multiple times, whatever be your reasons. For me, my mom is just very glad that her initially futile efforts have now been brought to fruition.

[Christian Crowley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was using this book to prepare for a trip to Tamil Nadu (South India) in 2007. Typical of all the books in the Colloquial series, this book offers a very steep learning curve for the beginner. It would be more accurate if the Colloquial books were labeled "for Intermediate Learners." The material is so dense, that I only made it through Lesson 5 of 16.

This is the only textbook I was able to find at the time, so it gets a star for that. The dialogs are interesting and topical, another plus.

Unfortunately the speakers are recorded at full speed, which is very hard for the beginner to make out. I ended up using GarageBand to transform the dialogs into a Pimsleur style repeat-and-learn experience. The index could use a good edit to help the reader track down particular words and language features. This book would also really benefit by offering some opportunities to practice reading Tamil script. As with all the Indian scripts, I found the best practice for beginners is in reading advertisements where the words are written vertically, one syllable at a time.

[Aarash Rahman · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is good book