Three good books for learning Kannada
Although this is primarily a blog for compiling translations, I think that posts about language learning are also useful and interesting. I would like to point out that I am not fluent in any of the languages that I translate from. Rather, I’m at various stages of learning with each of them, with an emphasis on reading comprehension over speaking.
At the end of the day, the only real way to become fluent in a language is to regularly interact with a speaking community of that language. There’s really no substitute for that. For example, my ability to understand Kannada increased tremendously after visiting family in Bangalore for just 3 weeks.
However, text-based resources can be an invaluable supplement in language learning, and an important tool to get good at reading. In my experience, language-learning books are notoriously hard to find for languages that do not have a large market of learners. A lot of people want to learn Spanish, so obviously there’s a large selection of good books for that. However, there’s not going to be as many high-quality resources for a language like Kannada!
After much searching, I found some good resources that finally helped me make real progress:
A Manual of Modern Kannada by Robert J. Zydenbos
Conversational Kannada by N.D. Krishnamurthy and Dr. U.P. Upadhyaya
IBH Kannada-Kannada-English Dictionary, ed. Prof. G. Venkatasubbiah, Prof. L.S. Seshagiri Rao, and Prof. H.K. Ramachandra Murthy
I’ll review each of these books below.
A Manual of Modern Kannada by Robert J. Zydenbos
Have you ever come across a book that feels like it was written just for you? That’s what I felt when I found this book. It’s an incredibly well-thought-out and thorough introduction to learning Kannada that assumes no prior knowledge. In fact, it is freely available as a pdf. It was published in 2020, so it’s super recent! This was very refreshing, given that the first time I tried to use a book to learn Kannada, it was Spencer’s A Kanarese Grammar from 1914. Unlike that book, Zydenbos gives extensive explanations about how the language is used in different contexts in the modern world. This includes examples of verb endings that are more common in Mysore-Bangalore vs. northern or western Karnataka, and of grammatical features that are often shortened/ignored in the colloquial speech of different regions. The author is clearly someone who has spent a long time living in Karnataka among Kannada speakers and has developed a deep understanding of the language.
One thing that stands out right away in Zydenbos’ style is his usage of very literal translations of Kannada into English. It may seem a little silly at times, but I find it useful in internalizing how Kannada grammar works. See his literal translation (as well as his meta-observation of translation issues) of a sign in at Chamundi Hill, Mysore:
For each grammatical feature introduced, several examples are provided, which demonstrate some of the varied contexts in which they can be used. Useful paradigms for mentally organizing the grammatical information are explained. Many wonderful tidbits of information are contained in the lengthy footnotes of each chapter, often referencing the more academic Kannada-language grammatical texts, and also making connections and analogies with other languages. Grammatical features in Kannada (and sometimes Dravidian languages in general) are often compared and contrasted to those of Indo-European languages. In my opinion, these discussions are both interesting and help contextualize the new grammatical information being learned. For example, an analogy is made between the formation of the past stems of verbs in Kannada and the strong-weak verb system in German. As someone who studied German for 4 years in high school, I think this analogy actually helped how I think about Kannada verbs in my head. The detailed discussion of Kannada’s relative particle system, in contrast to the relative pronouns of Indo-European languages, was also particularly insightful.
On a more mechanical level, I really appreciate the book’s usage of both Kannada script and a very consistent Romanization (transliteration) scheme. This way, one can start reading through the chapters while still learning the script, and not have any confusion about how words are pronounced. In my experience, emphasis on both the native script and unambiguous transliteration is hard to find in Kannada-learning texts.
Overall, I found this book to be both enjoyable and highly pedagogical. I initially intended to read through it linearly, but found myself skipping across and coming back to different chapters. With the searchable pdf version, this book certainly lives up to its name as a manual which can be easily referred to again and again.
Conversational Kannada by N.D. Krishnamurthy and Dr. U.P. Upadhyaya
Compared to Zydenbos, this book is a bit less pedagogical, and more geared towards having realistic conversations. According to its Foreword,it grew out of a series of lessons designed to teach Kannada to the US Peace Corps. It utilizes the so-called “micro-wave” technique - there are 50 short chapters, each with sample conversations based around a given topic/scenario, supplemented with a mix of brief grammar and cultural insights. In this way, it is similar to Rupert Snell’s Teach Yourself Complete Hindi or William Radice’s Teach Yourself Complete Bengali (both of which are great). The grammar topics covered are quite extensive (ex. the last few chapters cover things like reflexive action verbs, contrastive and subjunctive phrases, etc.). Importantly, these complex grammatical features are always centered around realistic conversations.
The Kannada text uses a Romanization scheme that is generally consistent , with a brief Kannada script section at the end of the book. At first, I was a little disappointed at the fact that the Kannada script was not used throughout, but now I actually think that this is good because it gives the authors freedom to phonetically represent the way Kannada speakers actually pronounce words.
Overall, this is a great book to read simultaneously with Zydenbos. I would say that Zydenbos gives better preparation for reading Kannada, while this book is better for speaking.
IBH Kannada-Kannada-English Dictionary
A good dictionary is necessary if you want to start reading actual literature in the target language. As I’ve started trying to read some of Girish Karnad’s plays, this dictionary has come in quite handy for the advanced vocabulary. It’s nice to have an actual published dictionary at hand, and not just rely on Google Translate, which may or may not be super thorough/accurate for Kannada. Furthermore, having to look up the dictionary form of words forces you to learn how to recognize declined/conjugated forms in text and deduce the root word. One nice thing about this dictionary is that it is Kannada-Kannada-English, meaning that Kannada words are defined in Kannada as well as in English. Reading the Kannada entries is a great way to build up a map of synonyms and related terms in the language itself.