Once I amazed myself. For the fact of learning something from scratch. All by myself. Through some techniques and simple observations. And picked up a skill, unaware of how it began.  And, I am describing the same to share.

How it triggered was my name. Yes! My simple name. Dozing in a class amid one dull afternoon in my 3rd year of under-graduate college, the last benchers, we the cult, were looking around for methods to kill time. Of the people around, one of them was busy scribbling in his book, some words in a language, that grabbed my eye. I asked him about what he was doing. He was writing the same words oozed by the professor, in Tamil.

I wasn't even aware that being in Bangalore and having a junta writing in Kannada, here was one person who could try something out of the box to write in his mother tongue. First of all, Tamil is a hard one to learn. As it has a script and a method totally different from the regular style. This language is very hard to speak, having so many tongue-twisters and imbibed meanings in words together which you will have decode them by joining sentences. This one simple fact of the toughness of the language caught my attention and I requested him to write my name in Tamil. And he did. So, there began my interest in the very language that I had no idea about.

When I compared my name with my father tongue Kannada and Tamil, I found a startling observation. The letters in Tamil were few to write and most of the remaining are permutations and combinations of these. It is a language which has very few vowels and implied letters which cannot be understood if, you are given to test in general. The wonderful thing was the words of Tamil and Kannada rhymed only that the writing script mattered. One sure method for people to catch/look for.

So, to the people who know Kannada, Tamil is easier to learn as it has fewer letters than the former and can be deciphered quite comfortably once the basic flow is grabbed hold. Reading and writing speed improves for obvious reasons of constant exposure. For me it were the news channels, movies, shop hoardings and billboards whenever I had a chance to visit Tamil Nadu or the local bus stands in Bangalore. Of course, I may not be well versed with the kind of exposure that the native gets, but it was an act of self-learning which I can be proud of.

Now, I amaze people in Singapore by reading and writing words in Tamil. When I can do it, so can you! Only important factor is to imbibe interest in yourself and the mission is half accomplished.