An eight-week plan to learn enough spoken Malayalam to be welcomed in Kerala, built for an English speaker with a trip on the calendar and no prior knowledge of Malayalam or of learning languages.
Read it here → https://naushada.github.io/learn-malayalam/
| Live | In this repo | |
|---|---|---|
| The eight-week plan | read | plan.html |
| Printable pocket card | read | pocket-card.html |
| Phrase bank, as data | view | phrases.csv |
Every phrase is written twice: a plain English respelling you can read straight
off the page (CHAYT-taa), and the precise scholarly transliteration in small
type underneath (chēṭṭā). Read the first, ignore the second until you want it.
Every phrase card also carries a hear it link that opens Google Translate
with the Malayalam already loaded, so you never have to go hunting for audio.
Every page is self-contained: no build step, no dependencies, no server. Clone the repo and open them directly if you'd rather work offline — the only thing they fetch is three webfonts from Google Fonts, and they fall back to system fonts without them.
Kerala has among the highest literacy and English fluency in India, so you will never need Malayalam there. That changes the goal. This plan is not optimised for survival coverage — it is optimised for accuracy on a small set. Four phrases with clean retroflex consonants read as respect; forty mangled ones read as a phrasebook.
So the vocabulary stays deliberately around ninety items, and the whole first week goes on your ear and mouth before a single useful sentence.
- The verb never changes for who's doing it. English says "I go" but "he goes"; Malayalam uses one form for everybody. That's a huge amount of memorising you simply never have to do.
- One pattern builds dozens of sentences. Malayalam doesn't say "I want
tea," it says roughly "to me, tea is wanted." Wanting, liking, knowing, being
hungry and understanding all use it. Learn
e-NIK-ku ___ VAY-namas a shape with a gap and later vocabulary drops straight in. CHAYT-taa/CHAY-chee— "elder brother" / "elder sister," how you call out to any stranger. English speakers default to "sir." This is the highest-leverage thing in the whole plan.
phrases.csv has six columns: malayalam, say_it, romanization,
english, category, week. Use say_it as your pronunciation field;
romanization is there if you later want the precise spelling.
To import into Anki: File → Import, choose the CSV, set the field separator to comma, tick Allow HTML in fields off, and map the columns to your note type. Import with the header row skipped.
The week column exists so you can study only what you've reached. Filter a
deck with a search like:
deck:Malayalam week:1 OR deck:Malayalam week:2
…if you tag on import, or just sort by the column and add cards in batches.
category values: greeting, address, core, frame, number, teashop,
food, transport, question, repair.
Open pocket-card.html and hit Print this card. One sheet, single-sided.
Fold along the dashed line with the ink facing outward — each half becomes
one face of a pocket card, so you get a double-sided card without duplex
printing. Panel heights are set in millimetres and fit both A4 and US Letter.
The say_it spellings are approximations aimed at English speakers: capitals
mark the syllable to linger on, and doubled vowels are held about twice as
long. They will get you understood. The romanization column is the precise
version, where macrons mark long vowels (ā ī ū ē ō) and under-dots mark the
tongue-curled consonants (ṭ ḍ ṇ ḷ ṟ ḻ) — distinctions plain English spelling
cannot show.
Spoken Malayalam varies by region; Thiruvananthapuram and Kozhikode diverge noticeably. Cross-check anything you plan to lean on with a native speaker. A printed page can only give you one version of a living language.