I’ve been busy exploring career options in teaching people be better language learners. I ran into someone who works as an education coach, someone who helps people with time management, study skills, and generally become a better student. It occurred to me that there was probably something called “language coaching”, and it turns out I’m right! There is! But this
In Tamil, there’s a lot of English words that are composed of several tamil words. For example, “News Stand” is “Seithiththaal Nirbanai Nilaiyam”. I was having difficulty learning “news stand” because it was very long and, besides “Seithiththaal”, which I knew to mean “news” already, the rest of the word was meaningless to me. I felt a form of “repulsion”
I’ve almost reached intermediate level with Tamil. I’ll consider myself intermediate when I can identify the grammar points in Tamil O level papers. I’ve hit a roadblock understanding the relative clause, also known as the adjectival clause, in Tamil. This then led me to reading up on this particular grammar point, which eventually led to a deeper understanding of what
I’ve been very interested in the ‘best’ way to learn vocabulary recently, especially when first starting out learning a language. At first, I concluded that one should use flashcards to learn frequent vocabulary before diving into reading practice. So I decided to put my conclusion to the test by making some physical flashcards, English word on one side and Tamil
My Tamil is at the point where I can ‘understand’ (some) spoken Tamil on TV if I can read English subtitles. In contrast, my Mandarin Chinese is at the point where I can understand news if I can read both in Chinese subtitles and listen to the Chinese. I’ve been feeling frustrated by the fact that while I can describe
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
I’m in the process of moving my old pages over and adding in new ones. For now, however, I wanted to talk about something that’s happened to me. I haven’t listened much to Carnatic music or music from India in general. I started listening to some Tamil music on spotify when I started learning Tamil. It didn’t really help me
Given Southeast Asia and Singapore’s history, we’ve ended up speaking languages with English terms to refer to terms and actions. Is using English words okay when trying to learn Chinese/Malay/Tamil? I think it depends on your language learning goals and how people use the language, specifically: 1) Whether it’s normal for native speakers to sprinkle English words1) Where you’re going