I have a few Kannadiga friends at UIUC, so sometime in May 2023, I started learning Kannada. Learning any language in adulthood is challenging, but learning Kannada is even more challenging since not many people want to learn this language, so there are very few good resources available. It's hard to even figure out how to learn Kannada.
After trying out many resources, I finally found some good ones and have succeeded in learning some Kannada. This article documents what I think is a good way to learn Kannada, especially if you already know an Indian language. I think the ideas in this article can be used to learn any Indian language (except maybe Tamil), but the specific resources I'll list here are for Kannada.
How our Brain Learns Language¶
Learning a language mainly involves two things: vocabulary and grammar. Vocabulary is a mapping between a concept and a word representing that concept. Grammar is how we put together multiple words into a coherent sentence.
Consider this example:
| language | sentence |
|---|---|
| English | I go to the gym every day. |
| Hindi | मैं रोज़ gym जाता हूँ। (main roz gym jaata hoon.) |
| Kannada | ನಾನು ಪ್ರತಿದಿನ gymಗೆ ಹೋಗುತ್ತೇನೆ. (nānu pratidina gymge hōguttēne.) |
Here are the Kannada translations of the individual key words:
- I = मैं (main) = ನಾನು (nānu)
- every day = रोज़ (roz) = ಪ್ರತಿದಿನ (pratidina)
- go = जाओ (jao) = ಹೋಗು (hōgu)
It's not obvious how to combine these individual word translations to get the Kannada translation for the whole sentence. That's what we need grammar for.
Btw, the text in parenthesis next to the Kannada sentence is its IAST. You can also click the ट्र button on this page to transliterate Hindi and Kannada to any Indian language.
There are two main approaches for learning a language:
- The data approach: You hear/read a lot of sentences or words in your target language along with their meanings. Over time, you automatically start understanding it.
- The algorithm approach: You memorize vocabulary and grammar rules of your target language.
For computer scientists reading this article, you can think of grammar as an algorithm that converts ideas into sentences (and has your vocabulary available as a lookup table). The second approach is like reading the source code of the algorithm. The first approach is like trying to infer the algorithm from its input-output pairs.
The data approach is what babies use when they learn their first language. It's also the approach taken by Duolingo. Kannada is not available to learn on Duolingo as of now.
The disadvantage of the data approach is that you need a lot of high-quality data to learn the language. Your brain is essentially reverse-engineering the grammar from data. If you don't have a large source of sentences in your target language with corresponding translations, using this approach is difficult. (Interestingly, GPT3 seems to have learned language from just raw text.) Google translate is bad at translating Kannada, so I would recommend against learning from it.
The data approach also needs a lot of time. Babies take 2 to 5 years to learn their first language, despite getting high-quality data from their parents/surroundings, and not having any other responsibilities. The algorithm approach doesn't require much data, and you'll learn the language more quickly this way.
However, the algorithm approach has a major disadvantage: it's not the approach our brains are hard-wired for. Our brains have specific regions dedicated for producing and understanding language, and they work best if you learn a language 'naturally'. Constructing sentences using memorized grammatical rules is not something we are meant to be good at. You can never achieve fluency using the algorithm approach.
So if you don't have a large corpus of translations, what can you do? Combine the two approaches! First learn the language using the algorithm approach. Then switch to the data approach, i.e., read and listen to a lot of sentences in your target language. You won't need an external source to tell you the meaning of these sentences; you can just translate them yourself. As you continue reading and listening, your language instincts will kick in and over time you'll gain fluency.
(Disclaimer: I don't have scientific evidence to back these claims. They're just my hypotheses based on personal experience.)
In the rest of the article, I'll give details on the specific learning process that builds upon this high-level idea.
Roadmap¶
There are 4 phases to learning Kannada.
- Phase 1 - Trailer: Learn basic greetings and a few common words. Get to know the language a bit and decide if you really want to learn it. This should take at most a week or two.
- Phase 2 - Intro: Learn the Kannada script and brush up your source language's grammar. This should take 4 to 6 weeks.
- Phase 3 - Grammar and vocabulary: Learn the Kannada grammar and build basic vocabulary. I think this takes 6 to 12 months.
- Phase 4 - Practice: Read, listen to, and speak Kannada. Keep learning new words that you come across.
I recently finished phase 3. I can read children's books with a Kannada-to-english dictionary. I can hardly understand anything in spoken conversations; I can understand a few words but not much else. I don't know how long it'll take for me to be able to converse with my friends in Kannada.
These durations are based on how long it took me. I spend around 3 hours learning Kannada every Sunday, and at most 10 minutes every other day of the week.
You need not do the phases strictly one-after-the-other. It may be helpful to have a bit of overlap between phases.
Phase 1: Trailer¶
It's important to make an informed decision on whether you would like to actually learn Kannada. I underestimated how difficult it would be to learn a new language. If I knew it would be this difficult, I may not have started. By the time I realized this, I was already halfway through Phase 3. By then I had gotten somewhat attached to Kannada and I thought that now that I've come so far, might as well finish what I started.
If you frequently hear Kannada around you, you'd know what it sounds like. Otherwise, you should watch a few YouTube videos to find out. E.g., this travel vlog, or this movie trailer.
Learn a few common greetings in Kannada. You can do this by watching the first 4 videos of this YouTube playlist by @1minutekannadaclass.
Kannada shares many similarities with Hindi in grammar and script. I guess most Indian languages are similar in this way, but I'm not sure.
Grammatical Similarity with Hindi¶
As an example of grammatical similarity, consider this sentence:
| language | sentence |
|---|---|
| English | I am in the kitchen. |
| Hindi | मैं रसोई में हूँ। (main rasoee mein hoon.) |
| Kannada | ನಾನು ಅಡುಗೆಮನೆಯಲ್ಲಿದ್ದೇನೆ. (nānu aḍugemaneyalliddēne.) |
| French | Je suis dans la cuisine. |
These are the grammatical tokens in this sentence:
- subject: I = मैं (main) = ನಾನು (nānu) = Je
- verb: am = हूँ (hoon) = ಇದ್ದೇನೆ (iddēne) = suis
- preposition (prep): in = में (mein) = ಅಲ್ಲಿ (alli) = dans
- prepositional object (prepObj): the kitchen = रसोई (rasoee) = ಅಡುಗೆಮನೆ (aḍugemane) = la cuisine
So, the sentence structure in English and French is "subject verb prep prepObj", but the sentence structure in Hindi and Kannada is "subject prepObj prep verb".
This grammatical similarity means that if you already know Hindi (or maybe some other Indian language), it will be easier to learn Kannada. For many sentences, you can just translate each Hindi word/phrase to its Kannada equivalent separately and you'd get the correct Kannada translation. For this reason, you should try to learn Kannada from an Indian language instead of English, e.g., when you memorize words, memorize the meaning of Kannada words in Hindi instead of English.
Kannada uses Sandhi (संधि) extensively. In this example, we get ಅಡುಗೆಮನೆಯಲ್ಲಿದ್ದೇನೆ (aḍugemaneyalliddēne) by joining ಅಡುಗೆಮನೆ (aḍugemane), ಅಲ್ಲಿ (alli), and ಇದ್ದೇನೆ (iddēne).
Similarity with the Devanagari Script¶
Hindi, Sanskrit, and Marathi are written in the Devanagari script. The Kannada language is written in the Kannada script. Both scripts are phonetic, i.e., you can deduce the spelling and pronounciation from each other.
Kannada and Devanagari mostly have the same characters, but the symbols used to represent them are different. You can see the list of characters for Devanagari and Kannada on page 3 of U0900.pdf and U0C80.pdf, respectively (source: unicode standard).
Technical info: Devanagari and Kannada characters are arranged similarly in their unicode blocks, so one can get a pretty good transliteration from one script to the other by just addding the same offset to each character.
Phase 2: Intro¶
Review your Native Language's Script¶
Start by reviewing your native language's reading and writing skills, if needed. You should know the entire alphabet and how to form compound characters. I used to read Hindi regularly in my childhood since it was one of my subjects till class 8. That was 13 years ago (how time flies!). I mostly stopped reading Hindi after that, so my ability to read and write Hindi had been slowly atrophying since then. Fortunately, I gained it back super quickly with a day or two of review.
Learn the Kannada Script¶
Next, start learning the Kannada script. This wasn't part of my initial plan, since I only wanted to speak and understand Kannada, not read and write it. But I eventually realized my mistake. Here's why you should learn the script:
- Many good resources for learning Kannada, like some YouTube videos and textbooks, use the Kannada script.
- It won't take much time. It takes 4 to 6 weeks to learn the script, but learning the language will take months, if not years.
- You may want to take notes when you're learning Kannada, and if you try typing Kannada in a different script, you'll either lose convenience or phoneticness.
Watch @correctKannada's varnamale video to learn about Kannada characters. If you already know Hindi, then learning the consonants is relatively easy. You just need to know the mapping between Devanagari and Kannada characters. The vowels are slightly different, though, so pay attention to how they are pronounced.
You don't necessarily need to learn to write Kannada using pen and paper to be able to type it. Here are some ways in which you can type Indian languages:
- Add input sources on macOS: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250006842, https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/mac-help/mchlp1406/mac.
- Use Google input tools on the web.
- Add phonetic keyboards on Windows.
- Add a keyboard language on Android.
- Add a keyboard on iPhone/iPad.
When you read a piece of Kannada text, you can check whether you read it correctly by transliterating it to Devanagari (or any other Indian language). Here are links to some transliterators: trin, libindic.
Set up Spaced Repetition¶
Learning a language involves memorizing a lot of stuff. Fortunately, there's been some research on how to memorize things easily and effectively, and you should utilize the fruits of that research.
Spaced repetition is a technique to learn question-answer pairs effectively. To avoid forgetting answers, you need to keep reviewing the questions regularly. The key idea behind spaced repetition is that you can save time and effort if you review older or easier questions less frequently and review newer or harder questions more frequently.
A crude way to implement spaced repetition is to
associate a due date and duration with each question.
Initially, all questions have a due date in the past and a duration of 1 day.
Every day, you review a few questions whose due dates are in the past.
If you could correctly recall the answer to a question,
you increase its duration by a multiplicative factor,
otherwise you set its duration to 1 day.
Then you set due_date = today + duration.
There are apps that can keep track of these durations and due dates for you (otherwise this would have been very cumbersome). I use one such app, called Anki. Every day, I review around 20 to 40 questions on my phone, which takes 5 to 10 minutes. I do this while taking the bus to work or while eating. That's the only effort I put into memorizing stuff. I cannot emphasize enough how powerful this approach is: I have built a vocabulary of hundreds of words, and all I had to do was review Anki on my phone while commuting. Anki has made memorizing painless. (If only I knew about this technique in childhood.)
You can use Anki to learn the Kannada alphabet. Make a question for each Kannada letter and the answer is the corresponding Devanagari letter.
In later phases, we will use it to build vocabulary. While reading or listening to Kannada, you'll need to recall the meaning of Kannada words, and while speaking or writing, you'll have to recall the Kannada translation for Hindi or English words. The latter is harder to do. You don't need to explicitly memorize in both directions; the latter direction is sufficient, i.e., set Hindi (or English) words as questions and their Kannada translations as answers.
Review Grammar¶
English, Hindi, and Kannada share many grammatical concepts. If you have a strong grasp of these concepts, you'll be able to identify analogous constructs in Kannada. Check out these links to review your English grammar.
कारक (kaarak), aka विभक्ति (vibhakti) or case, is a very useful grammatical concept in Indian languages. If you speak Hindi, it'll be helpful if you know about all these 8 कारकs: करता, कर्म, कारण, संप्रदान, अपादान, संबंध, अधिकरण, संबोधन.
Phase 3: Grammar and Vocabulary¶
I recomend @correctKannada's Learning_Kannada_from_Scratch series for learning grammar, where he teaches Kannada from English. The total duration of this playlist is around 18 hours. His channel also has a 40-minute-long summary/trailer for the series.
I took notes while watching this playlist. When I need to revisit a concept, it's easier for me to read these notes than to rewatch the video and find the appropriate part. These notes don't cover everything, though, so they are not a replacement for the videos.
Roughly, these are the grammatical concepts that are covered (in this order):
- nouns, कारक (kaarak), and some prepositions
- personal pronouns and using them with कारक (kaarak)
- demonstrative and interrogative pronouns and adjectives
- tenses, verb conjugation, participles
- moods and modals
- post-positions
- adverbs and prepositions
- conjunctions
Btw, I implemented verb conjugation in JavaScript for English, Hindi, and Kannada: https://sharmaeklavya2.github.io/verbConj/.
@correctKannada's series only teaches grammar, not vocabulary. You'll have to build vocabulary from elsewhere. Here are some sources you can use:
- Miscellaneous nouns: https://kannadakalike.org/grammar/noun.
- Numbers: https://kannadakalike.org/grammar/numerals.
- Kannada wikibook. Especially good for animals, body parts, colors, fruits, vegetables.
- Nouns and phrases: https://e-kannada.com/learn-kannada-through-english/.
- Verbs: @correctKannada's 108 verbs.
Addings nouns to your vocabulary is easy. Learning verbs, adverbs, and adjectives reliably is hard, because most resources you'll find on the internet map Kannada words to English words. This can cause problems, since there isn't always a one-to-one mapping. E.g., the verbs ಉರಿ (uri) and ಸುಡು (suḍu) translate to 'burn', but they are not interchangeable. ಉರಿ (uri) means to get burned (जलो in Hindi), and ಸುಡು (suḍu) means to make something burn (जलाओ in Hindi).
Hence, to pick up non-noun vocabulary, don't just use tables mapping Kannada words to English words. Use sources that give you additional context, i.e., either a detailed description of the meaning, or examples where the word is used in sentences.
Phase 4: Practice¶
I'm currently in this phase, so I'm still figuring out what to do.
Start reading Kannada books. I have started reading the ಸವಿ ಕನ್ನಡ (Savi Kannada) textbook series. Download links: class 1, class 2, class 3, class 4. Visit the KTBS website for more textbooks.
If you can't understand the meaning of a word, you can use a Kannada-to-English dictionary, like alar.ink. For Savi Kannada textbooks, you can find English explanation videos by @yashaswikannadavaani: class 1, class 2, class 3, class 4.
To attune your ears to Kannada, you must listen to a lot of it. Kannaḍa Kalike has 30 videos with both Kannada and English transcripts. Dr. Bro's vlog on YouTube has around 150 videos (as of 17 March 2024), with English subtitles.
Other Resources¶
If you want to check out other resources, see https://www.alllanguageresources.com/learn-kannada/ for a list of what else you can try.