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
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