Tamil for Beginners

Tamil is one of the world's longest-surviving classical languages and is the official language of Sri Lanka, Singapore and a few Indian states. This free online course will begin by first covering greetings and how to introduce yourself in the Tamil language. You will start with the basics and learn words like ‘hello’, ‘good morning’, ‘afternoon’ and ‘evening’. Then you will study common phrases used to display good manners. You will also explore the numbering system in the Tamil language. We will break down each number to familiarise you with their compositions and pronunciation.  

Next, you will learn about colours. We explore the standard and primary colours and common objects such as tables, chairs, books and so on and use these objects and colours to form sentences in a practice section. Moreover, you will learn the terms for foods, fruits and anything drink-related to help you order foods and drinks in a restaurant or grocery store run by people who speak Tamil. In a practice section, we will also explore prepositions and verbs to help you form good sentences to describe foodstuffs. Discover that the Tamil alphabet has 31 letters, 12 vowels, 18 consonants and 1 unique character. Each letter and its pronunciation will be discussed in detail with examples to make them easy for you to identify.

We will then introduce you to some common animal terminology and verbs to help you form sentences in the Tamil language. Then we will teach you how to conjugate those verbs with pronouns like ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘we’, ‘they’ and so on. We highlight how the word of the verbs changes when conjugated. You will also learn that the word ‘they’ in Tamil has two vocabulary words, one for humans and another for animals. This course is for beginners with no history of understanding or speaking the Tamil language. Since the language’ text is not easy to read, we will also teach each lesson with the Tamil text, the English transliteration or pronunciation and the English meaning. Numerous examples and exercises also accompany each lesson to help you understand and practise what you are learning on your own. So do not delay. Sign up and start studying the Tamil language today.