Preface

Learning Tamil as a new language always frightens people who are only used to Germanic or Romanic languages. The alphabet is too large, the grammar is too complicated, or the language is spoken too quickly. These are typical reasons why people do not even try to learn the language. That even holds back Tamil people themselves who grew up in the Diaspora.

Those who are game enough to learn Tamil realize that this language is not that hard to understand. Apart from a different script, there is nothing that is so much more complex than Romanic languages. In reality, there are even fewer exceptions to existing grammar rules, so that you have to learn less by heart than, for example, in French.

The goal of this book is to give you a basic introduction to Tamil grammar. After studying this book, you should be able to destruct a Tamil text into its grammatical parts. You will also be able to build proper Tamil sentences and texts.

While this book teaches you the grammar, it won't help you with the vocabulary. You will learn some words, but this book is meant to be used with our app to learn Tamil vocabulary. So we recommend you use an additional resource to learn new words if you do not use our app.

This book will start teaching you the Tamil script. It will explain the difference between the Tamil and the Latin alphabet and why so many letters exist. By the end of this part, you will know how the Tamil script system is built and know how to learn the Tamil script efficiently.

After that, you will learn how to use the script to build words. Starting with nouns, you will get to know the different gender of nouns, how to form the singular and plural of a noun, and how to decline them. The chapter about nouns also includes pronouns, adjectives and articles.

The book then follows with a chapter on verbs. You will learn the grammatical tense in Tamil. You will learn how to build the present tense, the past and the future. Tamil verbs can be grouped in several ways, and in this chapter, you will get to see why these groups exist and what rules can be applied to each.

Once you reach this far, you can already read a sentence and destruct in grammatical parts. The book will then end with one last part, which will teach you how to build complete sentences. You will learn how a sentence is structured in Tamil, and you will discover that Tamil works without the need for the verb "to be", which is always irregular in almost all the Germanic and Romanic languages. By the end of this part, you will be able to construct nearly all types of sentences on your own.

As mentioned above, you should use the book with an additional resource to learn the vocabulary and pronunciation. The easiest way to learn Tamil is by using it as soon as possible. The more often you use the things you already know, the faster you realize that almost everything in Tamil follows the same patterns.