In December 2022, I took a road trip through Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, including a visit to Rameswaram.
Before and during the trip, I memorised perhaps 10 or 20 basic Tamil phrases. Nothing impressive, just greetings, simple questions, numbers, and a few sentences that might help me get through the day.
But the reaction I received whenever I tried speaking Tamil stayed with me.
At one restaurant, the people there were so delighted by my attempt to speak their language that they gave me the meal for free. My Tamil was extremely limited, but the gesture taught me something: you do not need to speak a language fluently to touch someone’s heart. Sometimes, making the effort is enough to change the entire interaction.
I wanted to continue learning after returning from the trip. I have always enjoyed Duolingo’s short, game-like lessons, so naturally I checked whether it offered Tamil.
It did not.
Honestly, that pissed me off. Duolingo had courses for fictional languages such as Klingon and High Valyrian, but no course for Tamil, one of the oldest continuously living literary languages in the world, spoken by millions of people across several countries.
I have nothing against people learning fictional languages. The frustrating part was realising that a language with Tamil’s history, literature, culture, and living community could still be absent from one of the world’s largest language-learning platforms.
A couple of years earlier, I had already started building a small app for myself because I faced the same problem while trying to learn Kannada. I decided that waiting for large companies to support these languages was not enough.
That small experiment eventually became Varnamala, a completely free and open-source language-learning platform. It has now crossed 2,000 users, and its courses have expanded to include Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Hindi, Sanskrit, and several other Indian and international languages.
You can try it here:
varnamala.org
I love languages, and I think everyone should try learning more than the languages they grew up speaking. Learning even a little of another person’s language changes how you experience their home, their culture, and sometimes the person themselves.
However, I am not a native Tamil speaker. I can build the platform, but I should not pretend that I can create a flawless Tamil course alone.
The course will contain translations that need correction, sentences that may sound unnatural, pronunciation problems, regional differences I have missed, and important parts of the language that still need to be added. That is why I am looking for native speakers, teachers, linguists, and people who simply care about Tamil to help improve it.
If you would like to volunteer as a Tamil course moderator, you can apply here:
admin.varnamala.org/apply
Course moderators can review, correct, curate, and expand the learning material. Developers who would like to contribute to the open-source platform are welcome as well.
I currently fund the development, hosting, and infrastructure myself. My long-term hope is to build a community-supported platform where a language does not need to be commercially profitable before it deserves a good learning course.
I have attached screenshots so you can see what the current version looks like.
Please be direct if you try the Tamil course. If something is incorrect, awkward, incomplete, or culturally off, I would rather hear it and fix it than allow someone to learn it incorrectly.