How to learn Kannada by watching TV shows in Kannada?
Kannada, less commonly known as Kannana or Kanarese, is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by 72% people of Karnataka in the southwestern region of India. Of the 21.7 Million Kannada speaking population 86% is in Karnataka. It was awarded the status of a classical language in 2008 and is estimated to be as old as 2500 years old, thereby ranking it to be the third oldest language in India, after Sanskrit and Tamil. Kannada is one of the 22 official languages and 14 regional languages of India. There are about 20 spoken dialects of Kannada (Ethnologue). They are usually grouped into three major groups: Northern, Southern, and Central. All the dialects are influenced by the neighbouring languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and others. Kannada is a highly inflected language with a grammar that is similar to that of Tamil. Like other Dravidian languages, it is agglutinative, which means that suffixes are added to stems to derive new words and to express various grammatical relationships.
Let’s now see how to learn Kannada by watching Kannada Television actively
TV shows will help you develop an instinctual feel for the pace and flow of actual spoken Kannada; and will introduce you to the kind of spoken Kannada that rarely show up in regular Kannada lessons or textbooks. TV shows include some street slang, subcultural expressions, shortened words, and even some beautiful poetic lines. Television Shows include Talk Shows, Documentaries, News, Game Shows, Comedy shows, Variety Shows, Sports, Sitcoms, Dramas, Scifi, Supernatural and Fantasy Shows, Soap Operas, Historical Shows, Adventure or Action Shows, Cooking Shows, Cartoons, Reality TV, DocuDramas, Police procedural or Crime Shows.
Some if not all can certainly be a value add to your learning and offer a similar if not same benefit as the TV shows can! Don’t miss watching the news in Kannada at any cost. It would be your friend for a lifetime! Choose a genre that’s simplistic to understand in the beginning, raising the bar with every lesson learnt efficiently. Remember that the Kannada language has evolved from the way it’s spoken in the 1900s to how it’s spoken today, so you may avoid learning from old shows.
Steps you could follow to get the best of your learning:
- Watch the show fully without any subtitles and record it simultaneously(if not available online to see again). Just soak up on the plot and try to grasp the “feel” of the show, what does it wish to convey. Go back to the start and re-watch it scene-by-scene: first, with no subtitles. After you’re done watching it in its entirety, watch it scene by scene to see which words you can grasp even without the help of subtitles. Every time you hear a word you’re not familiar with, write it down.
- Re-watch the scene but this time with subtitles. The Kannada subtitles will help you get the spelling and articles used correctly. But if you want to check if your understanding is correct, switch on the English subtitles in your 3rd viewing of that particular scene. Pay attention to the vocabulary and the context on how the words were used. Look out for any idioms and slang, and take note of the grammatical structures used in the sentences. Write down anything interesting you noticed, and be ready to review it later on.
- Listen and repeat new words. If there are some new words that you cannot seem to pronounce, listen to it and repeat the words and sentences over and over until you get the hang of it. Look up the words you don’t understand.
- If there are some things about the show that are bugging you—slang terms, regional jargons, double meanings, wordplays, and subtle humour that you couldn’t quite grasp—do some research or ask a native Kannada speaker to help you understand and appreciate it better.
- Re-watch the show until you are confident that you have understood the gist of the conversations and the context of the words.
Watch Colours Kannada for the latest TV shows.
Finally,
Kannada uses postpositions that are added to the end of noun phrases, usually after a case marker, to indicate time, location, instrumentality, and so forth. Postpositions are similar in function and meaning to prepositions in other languages. The standard, or prestigious, variety is based on the middle-class, educated Brahmin dialect of the Mysore-Bangalore area. The sound system of Kannada is similar to that of other Dravidian languages.
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