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Showing posts from July, 2014

Travails of a Lazy Kannada Learner

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"Old Kannada inscription dated 981 CE in Vindyagiri hill at Shravanabelagola"  Based on my efforts to learn Kannada, I have come to realize that there is a disconnect between the resources available and resources required for learning the language. While there is a steady stream of apps to help Kannada learners, they all seem to be based on the same basic pattern which I believe is not useful. When learning Kannada, a speaker of another Indian language is presented with two difficulties. One is the language and other is the script. In the absence of reading, the sole source of language data being absorbed is spoken. With spoken data, the learner can neither control the speed of the incoming data nor can he reliably repeat it. This severely slows down the vocabulary acquisition process. Without knowing the script, he cannot read the newspaper which is a good cheap source of plenty of reading material. Reading the newspaper in a language also provides a good sense of