How To Learn Telugu Through Tamil?

Which South Indian language shall I learn: Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam or Kannada?

• I want to travel to South India, I know only Hindi but I want to learn a South Indian language that would be the most useful. Which one is best to learn?

• Answer:

  If you like to learn a south indian language for reasons like interest in literature, i would suggest you learning tamil for its the most ancient language of india even before the arrival of sanskrit. And tamil is the only south indian language which can function very well without any sanskrit dependancy. And it has huge sources of literature which is entirely unique. If you want to learn a language for visiting south india, it depends where you like to go. The scripts of these languages are all different. Malayalam and tamil are similar languages. Telugu and kannada are similar languages. Most malayalam speakers can understand tamil. But most tamil speakers have difficulties in understanding malayalam. As far as the script is concerned, telugu and kannada scripts are very similar with few significant differences. But malayalam and tamil scripts are largely different even though there are some significant differences. Tamil script is different from other scripts that it has only few alphabets - eg. Tamil has 12 vowels and only 18 consonants. Malayalam script has alphabets that can express the sounds present both in sanskrit and tamil. So malayalam has more number of alphabets. If u are entirely learning for the reason to visit places, its enough if u learn basic phrases in these languages. Remember that, In south india, (next to native languages), english is more understood than hindi. So english can help you if u find it too hard to learn the languages.