July 2022 Update: For a number of reasons, I didn’t end up following through with this plan. I’m starting this challenge again, see this post for more information.
Telugu is one of the languages I have wanted to improve for a while. I now have more time (and better time management skills). This post will outline my current level of Telugu, what I want to learn, and how I plan on learning it.
I’m posting this online to hold myself accountable and to help others understand how I go about learning languages. Hopefully this can help guide your own language learning journey.
Where my level stands
Telugu is the South Indian language that my family speaks. I can understand Telugu at the level of colloquial YouTube videos and when my family speaks to me. I can not understand news (which uses formal Telugu) and struggle to follow along with the plot in movies. I can read Telugu slowly, but can’t read past an elementary school reading level, especially when formal language is used.
I would describe the language I use most regularly as Tenglish. That is, it uses the structure of Telugu with plenty of English thrown in (mostly for nouns and verbs). Due to the prevalence of English in India, “pure” Indian languages are seldom spoken outside of formal contexts. Most educated Indians will regularly use English words instead of the corresponding “pure” Telugu / Hindi / Tamil etc. word.
I can speak Tenglish at a basic level. But I struggle with more advanced word endings. Telugu is an agglutinative language, meaning that it conveys meaning by adding lots of smaller suffixes and endings together. For example, to say “while he was walking” in Telugu we would use a suffix (-u) on the word walk (nadustu). In English, you could pick out the continuous nature of the action by listening for the word “while” (or in Spanish with ‘cuando’). In Telugu, you need to pick out the -u to pick up on the meaning.
Because you can’t rely on helping words, Telugu has been particularly difficult for me to pick up. At my level of Telugu, I don’t understand all the word endings nor am I able to use them. My goal is to fix that.
My focus
For this summer, I want to focus on Telugu morphology. That is, I want to focus on all the endings and verb forms that give meaning to Telugu words. My focus is on being able to understand them when spoken, and be able to use it while speaking to my family. Other than what’s necessary to understand grammar book examples, I won’t focus on vocabulary or reading. From my linguistics research, pronunciation and morphology tend to be the two aspects of language learning that are difficult to learn by mere exposure.
To begin, I went through my grammar book and looked for any concept that related to a word ending. From there, I wrote down the topics which I don’t feel like I could comfortably explain to someone else or use. I also included concepts that I thought were useful, but weren’t strictly a word ending. As you can see, it was almost all of them.
- Personal Pronoun and Oblique Stem Formation (Chapter 8)
- Postpositions (Chapter 9.10, 9.15)
- Adverbial Nouns (Chapter 10)
- Adjectives (Chapter 12)
- Pronominalised Adjectives and Nouns (Chapter 13)
- Verbs conjugations (Chapter 14-16)
- Non finite verbs practice (Chapter 18)
- Intransitive, Transitive, Causative, and Reflexive Stems (Chapter 19)
- The Infinitive and Formation of Compound Verbs (Chapter 20)
- Verbal Noun and Verbal Adjectives (Chapter 21)
- Clitics (Chapter 24)
- Simple Sentences (Chapter 26)
- Coordination: Compound Sentences (Chapter 27)
- Subordination: Complex Sentences(i) (Chapter 28)
- Subordination: Complex Sentences(ii) (Chapter 29)
- Miscellaneous Grammatical Notes (Chapter 30)
Note that I included the entirety of a chapter even if I knew most of the concepts in it. Each week, I’ll break down a small chunk of chapters into individual sections.
Study Plan
This list is my outline for study. My normal approach would be to convert each of these topics into Anki cards that I can drill. But I’ve found the Anki-heavy approach exhausting.
Instead, for each topic I am going to do the following. I will read the section in my grammar book and the associated sentences. If there are exercises, I will do them, otherwise I will write down 2-3 sentences using that topic and send it to my grandfather for review. Finally, I will close my book and attempt to explain the concept and use it in a sentence.
Then I will move on. If I find that I know I want to use that topic in conversation, but struggle to remember it, I will create Anki cards to review it. But my general approach is to do this while also regularly speaking to people in Telugu (at least 4 conversations per week). Once I’ve gone through each of those concepts, the challenge is over.
My only set goal is to blog weekly about this challenge, other than that I have no strict rules. I usually try to set SMART goals, but I’m interested in exploring a challenge with no goals. I’ll let you know how it goes.