Forenote

This blog will be a series to learn Telugu. I made this for my partner to learn Telugu in a way that I learned Korean. I thought learning Korean was really easy from the resources I used (university education sucks), but I saw there was a lack of Telugu resources for something that was commonly spoken around the world. Like 8% of the world speaks Telugu, which may not sound like a lot, but it's def a lot considering 8 billion people on the earth.

I originally started this series trying to teach a Romanized equivalent to Telugu... until I realized how wrong that was. People reached out to me and thanked me for the course but what I realized was, that if they are willing to learn, then one should learn the letters themselves.

So I started working on restructuring a course and this is the first lesson I worked on.

Lesson One.

Anki Decks

There is no realistic way to progress through learning Telugu without actually learning the alphabet and being able to tell the differences between each of the sounds. I have linked below the Vowels Deck to start out with. This is using a free program called Anki.

After you have finished learning the vowels, the next step would also be the consonants.

Lesson

Telugu vowels are called అచ్చులు, which they can be placed around the consonant as independent or dependent letters. Independent means that they are placed before the consonant and are standalone, whereas dependent are similar to Chinese modifiers. For those who don't know either, it's similar to how accents in the Latin alphabet are added on to emphasize certain sounds. However, in Telugu, they either add on a whole vowel sound or append a vowel sound.

Telugu consonants are called హల్లులు, which are usually combined with a vowel to be complete. These consonants also be used as modifiers on other consonants, called conjuncts, but cannot "complete" a consonant like how a vowel does.

To understand what it means to be a complete vowel, look at "అచ్చులు". The "చ్చు" has a consonant conjunct and a vowel modifier attached, which demonstrates its completeness.

This table was done for the first 10 consonants in our list. Try to complete the list for all 34 consonants.

For those who want more practice studying these letters and sounds, check out this resource I found. I would like to note that from 7:49 everything is wrong, at least from the letter to sound shown. The sounds are correct if you want to play the guessing game of associating a letter to the sound said, but don't associate the letters to the sound.