Is it easy to learn Kannada if you know English?

We will be discussing the topic for today whether it is easy to learn Kannada for an English speaker by discussing details of various related and unrelated parts of the language. Let’s begin with the introduction to the two languages.

English, a West Germanic language which was first spoken in early medieval England,

emerged from the dialects and vocabulary of Germanic peoples—Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—who settled in Britain in the 5th century CE, while Kannada (also Kanarese), is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by the people of Karnataka in the south western region of India.

Origins

English is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the area of Great Britain that later took their name, England, while Kannada was contributed in South India, by Jains, who were the earliest writers of Kannada as known from the book Kavirajamarga an ancient book written by  a Jain King Nrupatunga.

Major Difference 

English is a language that rose to become the lingua franca of the world while Kannada is language spoken by linguistic minorities in the states of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Kerala and Goa; and also by Kannadigas abroad.

Reach

English has about 1.348 billion of total speakers in the world, with 369.9 million native speakers (those who speak English as their first language), 978.2 million non-native speakers (those who speak English as their second language) in the world, while Kannada has 0.0437 billion speakers around the world! English, a language official in 67 countries, 27 non-sovereign entities, Various organizations, United Nations, European Union, Commonwealth of Nations, Council of Europe, ICC, IMF, NATO, WTO, GUAM Organization for Democracy and Economic Development, ASEAN, ASEAN Economic Community, SAARC etc. English has a better foothold than Kannada that is one of the 22, official languages in India, and is extensively used in various academies and the government of Karnataka!

Mutually unintelligible 

English and Kannada are mutually unintelligible having developed in different family classes, and different regions of origin and use. English is native to British Isles region (originally) and now to the entire English-speaking world while Kannada is limited to being native to India specifically Karnataka with exception to migration of Kannada speakers all across the world.

English Language family runs from Indo-European —>Germanic—>West Germanic—>Ingvaeonic—>Anglo-Frisian—>Anglic—>English, while Kannada Language family runs from Dravidian—>Southern—> Tamil–Kannada—>Kannada–Badaga—> Kannada. 

Have no influence on each other

The languages that we have today, Kannada and English have not only been influenced by unrelated languages in their individual vocabulary, alphabet and grammar, but have evolved out of different writing systems also!

While English is most closely related to Frisian and Low Saxon, with its vocabulary significantly influenced by other Germanic languages, particularly Old Norse (a North Germanic language), as well as Latin and French, Kannada is closely related to Tamil and Telugu, with its vocabulary and alphabet  influenced by Sanskrit for ages. Kannada has obsolete letters such as ಅಃ and ಙ which are no longer used but exist only because our alphabet took whatever was there in Sanskrit and added a few more letters.

Latin script (English alphabet), Anglo Saxon runes (historically), English Braille, Unified English Braille form the English Writing System while 5th-century Kadamba script, Kannada Braille, Tigalari script (formerly) form the Kannada Writing System.

Dialects

There is also a considerable difference between the spoken and written forms of Kannada language. While the spoken Kannada tends to vary from region to region, the written form is more or less consistent throughout Karnataka. This is not the case with English with English having many dialects, usually referred to as regional varieties, that differ from each other in terms of patterns of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation! The pronunciation of particular areas distinguishes dialects as separate regional accents. 

The major native dialects of English are often divided by linguists into the two extremely general categories of British English (BrE) and North American English (NAE) with the existence of a third common major grouping of English varieties recognized by the Dialectologists: Southern Hemisphere English, the most prominent being Australian and New Zealand English. Kannada on the other hand, has “about 20 dialects” as reported by the Ethnologue, that also classifies a group of four languages related to Kannada – Badaga, Holiya, Kurumba and Urali.

Writing

Kannada language was written in Kadamba script,(a descendant of the Brahmi script, an abugida visually close to the Kalinga alphabet, the ever first writing system devised specifically for writing Kannada and Telugu) uses 49 phonemic letters, divided into three groups: 13 ಸ್ವರ svara (vowels), 34 ವ್ಯಂಜನ vyañjana (consonants), and ಯೋಗವಾಹಕ yōgavāhaka (semi consonants two letters: anusvara ಂ and visarga ಃ) and a character set almost identical to that of other Indian languages. The Kannada words for a letter of the script are ಅಕ್ಷರ akshara, ಅಕ್ಕರ akkara, and ವರ್ಣ varṇa. Each letter has its own form (ಆಕಾರ ākāra) and sound (ಶಬ್ದ śabda), providing the visible and audible representations, respectively. As known to mankind, English was written in a Latin alphabet (also called Roman alphabet since the ninth century). The modern English alphabet contains 26 letters of the Latin script: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z (which also have capital forms: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z). English uses 44 phonemes that fall into two categories: 24 consonants and 20 vowels. Note that there is no such thing as a definitive list of phonemes because of accents, dialects and the evolution of language itself. Therefore you may discover lists with more or less than these 44 sounds

Phonetic or Non Phonetic 

The Kannada script is almost entirely phonetic, but for the sound of a “half n” (which becomes a half m) while English script is almost entirely non-phonetic!

Syllables

Each written symbol in the Kannada script corresponds with one syllable, as opposed to one phoneme in languages like English. The Kannada script is syllabic. Since syllabaries are best suited to languages with relatively simple syllable structure, English language, that allows complex syllable structures, relatively large inventory of vowels and complex consonant clusters, makes it cumbersome to write English words with a syllabary. Hence, English is not classified as a syllabic language!

Grammar

The canonical word order of Kannada is SOV (subject–object–verb) as is the case with Dravidian languages however, English English marks grammatical relations through word order, following SVO (subject-verb-object).

Language Inflection 

Kannada is a highly inflected language, inflected for gender, number and tense, among other things, with three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter or common) and two numbers (singular and plural), while English is typical Indo-European language, following accusative morphosyntactic alignment that has largely abandoned the inflectional case system in favor of analytic constructions, unlike the other Indo-European languages(with the only exception being personal pronouns).

Pronouns

In many ways the third-person pronouns are more like demonstratives than like the other pronouns. They are pluralised like nouns and the first- and second-person pronouns have different ways to distinguish number.

English pronouns on the other hand  conserve many traits of case and gender inflection, and retain a difference between subjective and objective case in most persons (I/me, he/him, she/her, we/us, they/them) as well as a gender and animateness distinction in the third person singular (distinguishing he/she/it).

So with the above outrageous differences between the two, I hope I am able to clarify, how, knowing English virtually has no consequences to learning Kannada. As also discussed above the two are mutually unintelligible languages with stark differences, where a learner will have to unlearn things from English to learn them as a part of Kannada learning!

While there is no data available on the difficulty level of Kannada for English speakers, most English speakers find Kannada pronunciation challenging, with 10 vowels, 2 diphthongs, 34 consonants, and a large number of distinctions not found in English!