:cheers;
I'll bring this over here...
I speak, but am illiterate in Greek. And I have working knowledge in descending order of ability (reading more than speaking); Italian, Spanish, and French. I'm a native English speaker and I'm in the infancy of trying to learn German. I also can fight my way through Latin.
Wow, that's quite a plate of old languages you got there man
. How do you find the similarities and differences between the languages? Do you find that knowing one helps you to easily grasp another?
If you know an effective way to do so?
How is it in Tamil, do the letters stand for a specific "sound" ? Because well, all European languages do afaik. At work, I've a Chinese guy now. I also talked with him and as far as I understand, it is different in Chinese. The letters stand for a complete word or meaning. If you don't know the letter/sign, you're lost.
In all indian languages, the letter = a sound. Be it a consonant or a vowel. So when you know the characters you can basically start reading. That's when vocab kicks in. So let me break it down for you using tamil
? = "ka" as in "Condition"
?? = "Ki" as in "Kidding"
?? = "Kee" as in "Key"
Basically the first one is a short "e" sound, and the second one is a longer "e" sound. I'll make a video of this for you if you need help.
But basically, you just take the letter for "Ka" and modify it slightly to make it say different vowels. Or you can put a dot on it, and stop the sound altogether like:
??
So essentially it's just combining consonants and vowels together to make sounds. So for just the consonant "k", here are all the different vowels you can add:
?? ? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ??
Which is "k, ka, kaa, ki, kee, ku, kuu, ke, keh, kai, ko, kO, kau"
So for each one, I've put the short vowel sound first and the long vowel sound second. So when it's ku and kuu it's like the "kuu" sounds in "cooking" and "cooling"
Then you have the other consonants:
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ???????????
"Ka cha ta tha pa ra ya Rra la va zha zhla nya nga NNa na ma na"
And I can't really say it in text, so the video is here:
http://harishphoto.com/mobile/VID_20120509_160042.mp4