Category: telugu

Since updating my language goals on January 3rd, I’ve made some progress:

A grand total of 1h 10mins of progress, that is. At least, that’s how much time active time I’ve spent on my Telugu studies. I have done more hours of passive work, like reading some news articles, listening to music, or watching TV in a target language (such as Spanish, French, or Telugu), but my goal is to increase the amount of active study I do. Active study is the hard stuff that pushes you outside your comfort zone and ultimately improves your ability.

Some observations I’ve made so far:

3 hours is a lot of time 🙁

To reach my goal, I would have to do between 2 – 3 hours of study a week. That’s a lot of time. It’s been nearly 4 years since I was a full-time student, which was the last time I was sitting down to really study something. It’s really hard! I forgot how hard it was. My brain hurt after 10 minutes of trying to read Telugu.

Don’t want to read? Watch this video instead!

Today, I’ll outline sounds in Telugu that are different from their English counterparts, or don’t exist in English. We’ll need to learn them in order to pronounce Telugu properly, hear distinctions between certain words, and have a good accent. I’ll focus on consonants for this post. I’ll begin by just going over the sounds, without focusing on the more technical linguistics behind it. If you’re curious to learn more, I’ve included it at the bottom of this post.

This is a very quick introduction to Telugu verbs – designed to help you get speaking right away. To keep it simple, I’ve decided not to include some more advanced stuff like spelling changes or irregular verbs – I’ll cover them in a future post.

I’m writing this article to provide an update to this post. Since writing, it here’s what I’ve gotten done:

• bought tickets for RRR (a new Telugu film) on Friday
• skimmed through a book (Learn Telugu in 30 Days) to see what I would learn from it, but didn’t study it

I wanted to get more done by this point, and in the spirit of working on the process, here are some things that I think I need to do to be more successful in this endeavor.

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.