Learning Malay in addition to Tamil
I’ve decided to learn Malay on top of my Tamil.
I’m challenging myself to not take up Italki lessons for as long as possible, which is how I normally learn a language. Instead, I will only rely on materials that I can find online and offline. I can speak to people who I meet on the streets, but I cannot pay to practice talking.
Compared to Tamil, which has an abundance of material in Tamil itself but very little available for Tamil learners, Malay has a wealth of resources to work with. I also have the advantage of being used to Malay. I have heard it spoken at home, so it is not ‘strange’ to me like Tamil was when I started.
How am I learning my Malay? The Singapore newspaper, Berita Harian, has an auto-translate function so that people can get more familiar with formal Malay (I have added this resource into my Malay resources page). I also found a wonderful youtube channel called “I Wanna Learn Malay” that gives explanations on grammar points and gives good example sentences. This is how I am currently learning.
By restricting myself from using Italki, I should, in theory, be stunting my ‘productive’ language skills, such as speaking. This means that while I should be able to listen and read well with the material available to me, I should have a more difficult time speaking. Writing should not be affected because I can write whenever I want to.
I also decided to start listening to Malay songs. Curiously, I tried listening to Malay songs before I started learning Tamil, and it was, like Tamil songs, strange to me. However, after I started feeling at home with Tamil songs, Malay songs now do not feel alien at all.
One song that I like listening to is Dolla’s “Impikan”. Sierra Lisse, an inactive channel at the time of writing, has a nice explanation of the lyrics.
Let’s see how this goes!