Kannada Gottilla to Svalpa Kannada Gottu

2025-06-08

I moved to Bengaluru in July 2023. I learnt my first word - hesaru when someone asked me my name. With a great enthusiasm, I picked the book Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner to learn the language. Then, procrastination kicked in.

After not knowing the language for about a year, in Aug 2024, I resolved to learn Kannada. Why now? For survival. I was not able to speak with the locals, share words with them except for kannada gottilla. Neither was it easy to navigate life, like shifting of houses. Without the language, I can live but I can't thrive in Bengaluru.

How I learnt it?

1. Used Anki flashcards for remembering the language.
2. This YouTube playlist - Kannada Kaagunitha is clean, clear and super good for learning the sounds of the language. I went through the playlist, learnt the alphabets, their sounds and added it to my Anki deck.
3. The Fluent Forever book has 625 frequent words for which I created Anki cards using Google Translate and Alar - V. Krishna's Kannada English Dictionary¹.
4. Sentenced were created using Google Translate and the words meaning were found by mapping to Alar and then they were added to the deck.

The flash cards created contains Tamil words and alphabets at some places. But it can customised to any other language. How can you customise the deck for you? Sounds (alphabets) in Kannada language overlap with sounds in other Indian languages. For each note in the deck, if the word is in Tamil/English, use the above resources (Kannada Kaagunitha YouTube playlist, Google Translate and Alar) to change it to your familiar language.

How to learn faster? Add more images to the deck - evolution has made our brain to store images better than abstract facts. Personalizing the deck helps in better retention of the words in memory by making more connections for the word with other items in memory and also ensures better retrieval of information. For instance, put in your pet dogs photo to remember the Kannada word for the dog. Read the Fluent Forever book or the notes of it by Derek Sivers for more pointers on learning faster.

The Anki deck is made public here. In the coming months, I will add more sentences as I learn more words. A v2 of the deck can be expected by year end.

My level of language and vocabulary currently is of a 7 year old's. But I hope to learn more words, improve my vocabulary, write a few phrases on my own and get fluent by the end of this year.