amharic111 wrote:Thanks for sharing your story and approach!
No problem!
I'll use your approach too for my Amharic learning. I'm sure I won't find any comics but I will try and find some children's stories to start reading.
Yeah, I mean, the point is simply to start from relatively basic reading material and keep trying to challenge yourself by increasing the difficulty level of what you're reading. Personally, I preferred to stick with one kind of reading material for a while before "graduating" so to speak to the next one.
Actually, I was hesitant when I first started reading novels because I thought that would be too hard for me to handle, but I tried anyway because my dad suggested it and encouraged me since he finally felt like I could handle it (he also helped me pick out my first Malayalam novel).
What was the progress like when you were reading and how is your Malayalam now?
Thank you for the tips
So, when I was about twelve years old, my dad told me that I knew Malayalam well enough to get by in Kerala (the state where it's spoken), and I guess you could say that was my starting point. To be honest, I would say progress was awfully slow for me, but basically, what would happen is that I'd start reading one kind of reading material such as cartoons, and then once I'd read a bunch of cartoons, felt fairly comfortable that I could understand what was going on in them (and perhaps got confirmation of this from my parents), and either was ready to move on to the next level or got encouragement from my parents to do that, I'd move on to the next level.
Once I started reading novels in particular, since the vocabulary they use is relatively advanced, I started to get used to words I had otherwise never seen before. Sometimes, my dad likes to challenge my vocabulary skills by asking, "Hey, do you know what [word] means?" and sometimes I can guess. Whenever this happens, he's impressed and keeps trying to find new words to challenge me, and it also helps him feel like my Malayalam just in general is at a high level, which in turn helps him feel comfortable talking to me in it. Sometimes I learn new words from him, usually because he just happens to use them (sometimes he'll also stop in the middle and ask me whether I know what that word means, or even interrupt discussions at parties with other Malayalee people, because it's not very likely that I do
), and then I try to write them down so I can keep quizzing myself over them.
By now, I think it's fair to say that I'm fluent in Malayalam. I can understand novels reasonably well (sometimes the details make my eyes glaze over or even make me want to put the book down and roll my eyes), I can understand clips from TV shows without any real problems (although I can find new vocabulary words in them, too, which is also cool), I can even understand poetry somewhat well, but movies can be really hard especially since I have to keep track of the rather complicated plot in addition to understanding what everybody's saying! I still stumble sometimes when I'm trying to form a sentence, but no one even seems to notice, and it's fairly rare that anyone points out any mistakes in what I said (even though people used to do this all the time and sometimes I do catch myself making mistakes). In fact, my dad often brags about how good my Malayalam is to other people including my mom and feels like I speak Malayalam better than anyone else in my generation (even in Kerala itself). I'm not so sure that's true, but it's great to have that much encouragement!