Links

I have found the following resources excellent for learning Tamil. I present them here since I believe they are very beneficial, and thus deserving special distinction. For learning Tamil, truly good resources are hard to come by.

I must stress that all of the comments in this page are my personal opinions, and that not everyone will necessary agree with those opinions. In other words, use your own judgement in reading this page and following up any of these resources.

Reading

• iPaatti print books - traditional printed books
• StoryWeaver - free and open-source stories for children in several languages, including Tamil. The stories are sorted by level of difficulty. So you can start with Level 1 (Emergent) and choose when to move to Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, and Level 4.
• Asher, R.E., and R. Radhakrishnan. A Tamil Prose Reader: Selections from Contemporary Tamil Prose with Notes and Glossary. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, England. (1971.)
  This book is a collection of stories from various authors that have been arranged with the purpose of increasing one’s reading comprehension. The stories are arranged in order of increasing difficulty, with footnotes and a glossary covering all new words. The lessons require a mastery of the basic set of Thamil grammar (lessons in Parts 1-3 on this website).

Listening

• Netflix - Tamil movies exist on Netflix
• Youtube - Tamil songs and stories for kids and clips of movies exist on Youtube
• Narration of Ponniyin Selvan - the transcription and narration of an epic novel in Tamil. It is good for matching pronunciation to writing, although there is no assistance for understanding the meaning, and the level of writing is fairly advanced.

Education Games and Other Resources

• iPaatti board games - find board games for Tamil that are like Scrabble or Taboo that are tile-based and flash card-based

• iPaatti digital games - find app games for Tamil. (I haven’t used these personally, but they seem promising).

• iPaatti interactive books - there are 3 interactive books on the iPatti website. Navigate the website to see the others

• Vaaranam Books - thick board-books for 2-3 year olds to be introduced to the language. Not geared towards second language acquisition, but worth mentioning anyways for the good quality.