Language Overview: Telugu

[@InosukeHashibira-h8q]

Native Telugu Speaker from Telugu Land here. You did great work there, most of your pronunciations are accurate. you earned a subscriber

[@belstar1128]

overlooked language almost nobody outside of India knows about it but it has over 100 million speakers

[@tj-co9go]

I thought every one in india talked only English and Hindi /sarcasm

[@Ani-13-w8d]

I am a native speaker of Telugu and I must say YOU NAILED IT! There are a lot more suffixes and some affixes too although they are usually considered a case inflected adposition so yeah this was awesome!!!! You should have mentioned about the noun water though, niːru for singular and niː LLu the L is retroflex and it actually comes from ni:ru + lu and the l assimilates into L and this is very very common in telugu. Thanks a lotttt for doing this. I wanna see a video for Farsi too I am learning it and it is so so beautiful!!!!

[@watchyourlanguage3870]

The exact comment I was hoping for! Thanks!

[@krovraink]

Yo I speak Malayalam and i am glad to see a dravidian language on here Telugu gets such little recognition despite being so spoken, absolute W

[@rocketterrier]

I'm surprised that for being so common of a language that there isn't more videos on it. Languages from the Indian subcontinent are so cool and I feel like they don't get talked about a lot. Awesome video, by the way!! 😊

[@C_In_Outlaw3817]

What I love about Indian languages is the alphabets they use. So pretty

[@raestera]

I was looking into Malayalam yesterday out of curiousity and thinking "man, there are like no resources for Dravidian languages" then this gets uploaded. Good stuff!

[@bluetannery1527]

this is why i love WyL, who the hell else is covering Telugu in such detail?? Fuck yes

[@harishaditham918]

Hi native Telugu speaker here- great video! Since you asked for feedback: There are also “human numbers” for 8 and 9. It is not just “enimidi mandi” and “tommidi mandi” as you said. It is enamanduguru and tommanduguru respectively for 8 and 9. In daily usage, we never use naku pilli undi for saying I have a cat. The possessive is stated as “naa daggera pilli undi”- which translates to “there is a cat near me” but indicates ownership. The formation “naku” is usually used to indicate possession when it is within/ inside me physically or mentally. Naku daggu undi- i have a cough. (Possession within me). Naku juttu undi - I have hair. Or naku kopam vacchindi - I got angry. Hope this helps. Gracias otra vez para traer este video sobre mi lengua native!

[@based4560]

Manchi ga cheppaavu

[@theodiscusgaming3909]

It's inalienable vs alienable possession, "నాకు ఇద్దరు పిల్లలు ఉన్నారు" అని అంటాం కానీ పిల్లలు మనలో ఉంటారా?

[@anandsai9378]

ఎనుమండ్రు, తొమ్మండ్రు in Classical Telugu 👍

[@lynqsx]

Well, didnt expect telugu...

[@AnglishThane]

I’m a native Kannada speaker and I never realised how complicated Dravidian languages can get before watching this. A lot of the features you mentioned also exist in Kannada but with different pronunciations (for example our “if suffix” is ದರೆ/dare and our inanimate plural is ಗಳು/gaLu). I’ve used all these complicated features in my everyday speech without thinking twice about why I’m even using it, it’s just something that comes naturally. Another interesting thing is that Telugu and Kannada have very similar scripts. Very interesting and informative video!

[@watchyourlanguage3870]

I found the cognate suffixes very interesting, thanks!

[@mohansheshu4049]

DhanyavadaguLu

[@becktronics]

As a polyglot, I spent most of my teenagehood and early 20s learning European languages and East Asian languages that people in the Western world are generally familiar with. After I started learning Tamil, I feel like it opened up my world to an entire wealth of culture, as the Dravidian languages have so much depth to them! Great channel, looking forward to seeing what you create.

[@lightray9264]

I’m an American born Telugu and am very into linguistics and language learning but I can’t speak Telugu, mainly for lack of motivation to do so. However watching this has honestly restored my motivation to learn this language.

[@watchyourlanguage3870]

You should!

[@based4560]

Nuvvu purti ga Telugu nerchkuntavu, em tension paraku. You will learn Telugu completely, take no stress.

[@lightray9264]

update: this is genuinely the most fun I’ve had learning a language. I love how much information you can get across with so few words

[@abhinavpatil759]

Around 12:20, you say that linguists tried to make the case system fit European standards. Actually, it isn't the standards of European languages, but rather of Sanskrit, and the linguists in question are the classical/medieval era indigeneous linguists of South Asia, which has one of the longest descriptive linguistic traditions of anywhere (though not without flaws by modern standards, this being a notable one). I'm sure there was a *little* bit of "Eurocentric linguists writing Eurocentric grammars" going on in the last few hundred years that had an impact, but by far the more important influence was the Paninian grammarian tradition of Sanskrit. The similarity you see with e.g. Slavic is becaude of Sanskrit and Slavic's shared Indo-European roots. You are correct, of course, that the traditional IE case template doesn't apply very well to a Dravidian language. I think in recent decades linguists have adopted different analyses, but the tradition weighs heavily, and on many places on the Internet that lack scholarly rigor (lookinf at you Wikipedia) you'll still see the traditional Sanskritic model-and not just for Telugu, but all Dravidian languages.

[@watchyourlanguage3870]

You’re 100% correct, I have seen a lot of different takes on how many cases Telugu has, and Sanskrit definitely was a key model for that

[@Thebestman-f1j]

I am so happy that you learned this Language! ❤

[@shadowray7270]

Telugu speaker here. I didn`t learn the language in this way. What i meant is, thinking about every conjugation and such in my school days. Perhaps, it is due to being native. It is fun seeing through different lenses. Some things i want to say are: 1. Have u read about "sandhi" in telugu grammar? It was taught to us and that is how we mostly perceive how different words join to form words with different letter. 2.The "am" sound at the end of word is used for informal use case rather than formal use case with respect to "mu" sound. So for a formal use i.e., when u write for example "a week" u write it as "oka varamu" giving it a more formal look(and read as just what u wrote) but when u are speaking to others u can say "oka varam". It`s not much a big deal now as the lines are getting blurred overtime but the perception still exists. Same is the case for "thank you" when used "standalone" will be written and spoken as "dhanyavadamulu" rather than "dhanyavadalu". While both are okay to speak in formal or informal use cases, former is a bit more respectful than later. These are for normal words that u speak in everyday lives. So when transcribing these kind of perceptions can be left out and you can transcribe as it is (for example sanskrit to telugu or some other language to telugu something like that) as what and how it is being conveyed is important that how the language should convey. These are small things and i appreciate the effort you have put up and the video. To be honest most of the video flew over my head as i never had a touch with linguistic courses or how to study a language, but i can recognize most of the stuff and why it is like that.

[@watchyourlanguage3870]

I have read about sandhi, although I definitely wouldn't say I'm good at it. The only time I really engaged with it for this video was when I was writing the Telugu subtitles (which probably aren't that great), I needed to combine hallu and aksharam to make a word for "consonant character", and since I had read that U and A combine into long O, I wrote హల్లోక్షరం , which I'm not even sure is the correct way to say it, but yeah, that's the extent of my experience with sandhi.

[@Rhythm412]

Thank You very much for making a video on an Indian language! Please also make videos on other Indian languages and scripts also as your videos are very detailed and good if a person wants to learn a language.👍❤ your pronunciation of Telugu and Indic words is so accurate, just like an ordinary Indian! I just can't believe how you literally learnt Telugu and spoke so accurately🤯🤯

[@marrrtin]

As a student of Thai I can see that modern Telugu and modern Cambodian Thai and Lao have a common ancestor script. I can even see it might also be the origin of the round Mon or Burmese script as a common ancestor of both branches.

[@tj-co9go]

🤯🤯🫨❤ wow I didn't know that

[@abhilashch2189]

Thanks for shedding light on Telugu and you did a great job. @26:32 నాకు పిల్లి ఉంది (Naku pilli undi) is a correct but somehow feels wrong. నా దగ్గర పిల్లి ఉంది (naa daggara pilli undi) is the correct usage for "I have a cat". నెనర్లు (Thanks) ❤️

[@ApprentiPolyglotte]

It's very interesting! It's a pity there is so little information available on Indian languages that have dozens of millions of speakers, so thank you for doing this. (The video is a little fast though, I often had to pause it). The thing with the weird nasal sound reminds me of Polish nasals. And the gender-animacy things is kinda reversed compared to Polish (where virile vs. non-virile is only in the plural).

[@hithere833]

Amazing video, and a language I wasn't expecting. Totally thought you were going to do a video on italian or dutch, though I am happy to hear about a language i hear and know so little about!

[@C_In_Outlaw3817]

Hey man, new subscriber here! Love your videos. I only took 1 linguistics course in college so some of what you talk about goes over my head a bit. But you make me want to look up new linguistics concepts to learn more. Thanks a bunch !!

[@tigergaj]

Keep dping your amazing work. More youtubers linw you should exist. I keep rewatching tge polish video and every time i realize that there's more information that I missed the first time.

[@david_oliveira71]

Interesting choice, and ధన్యవాదాలు (Dhan'yavādālu) !

[@danielwalter1467]

4:44 the funny thing is that the word dolphin comes from greek δελφίς, which of course was pronounced with an aspirated p😅

[@timepasswithaswin2008]

14:34 Just a small correction in the standard dialect we don't really use 'neevu' in daily conversations anymore... It's more of an archaic word by now Also ౘ and ౙ are still used in telugu in speech but just not written down for example while saying చందమామ the initial చ has a slightly different pronounciation than the cha sound Same with జాబిల్లి where the ౙ sound is applied But due to the differences between these sounds being almost indiscernable even to native speakers sometimes. So we just slowly stopped using these letters and they are not even in our education system right now

[@crazybfg]

Let's goo Telugu is such a W

[@pbsk5]

It's unreal how intuitive all of this is to native speakers! Great job! You got the pronunciations right and dug deeper into the grammar rabbit hole 😊

[@based4560]

Amazing video, I've literally been waiting for a video like this a Telugu speaker.

[@itacom2199]

The Italian of the East 🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇹🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳

[@aureltoniniimperatorecomun4029]

Commento di un uomo di cultura. Modifica, lo dice nel video, ma comunque

[@itacom2199]

@@aureltoniniimperatorecomun4029 si, lo so che lo dice

[@unconsciousman]

and Italian is telugu of West ❤

[@itacom2199]

@@unconsciousman of course XD

[@unconsciousman]

@@itacom2199 do you speak Italian?

[@theodiscusgaming3909]

Thanks a lot for making a very detailed video about Telugu. A bit of feedback: 2:52 there is a marginal vowel phoneme ӕ: in some dialects 3:17 this applies to all vowels other than a, there is an epenthetic j before front vowels (e i) and an epenthetic ʋ before back vowels (o u) but at the same time this is optional unless it is separating 2 vowels in which case it's mandatory 3:24 this varies by dialect, but e before a usually becomes ɛ and long e: becomes ӕ: . This feature applies to all vowels too, they have the following allophones before a a(:) -> ɑ(:) e -> ɛ e: -> ӕ: i(:) -> ɪ(:) o(:) -> ɔ(:) u(:) -> ʊ(:) 4:27 it's a bit more nuanced than that. While it is true that Indo-Aryan picked up retroflexes from local languages after entering South Asia, retroflexes are a South Asian areal feature, Iranic langages like Balochi and Pashto have them and even isolates like Burushaski. I have not seen any evidence that these languages adopted retroflexes due to _Dravidian_ influence. 4:47 There are a few rare native words that have aspirates, like words for numbers: paddhenimidi "18" mupphai "30" nalabhai "40" yābhai "50" ḍabbhai "70" enabhai "80" tombhai "90" That said, aspirates are basically marginal phonemes. They are common in formal speech but they are usually merged with their unaspirated equivalents in casual speech. 4:53 We might have separate letters for those, but it's not pronounced like a syllabic r anymore in modern Indian languages. Hindi pronounces them as 'ri' while Telugu pronounces them as 'ru' except for in the name 'Krishna' where it is pronounced as 'ri'. 5:27 There is only 1 word I know that has the ṅ/ఙ letter: vāṅmayaṃ and ofc it's a Sanskrit loan that I don't even know the meaning of. ts/ౘ and dz/ౙ became obsolete long ago. ṟ/ఱ is semi-obsolete, it's taught in schools but not used anymore although it used to be used before. And it doesn't represent r: but rather just /r/ while the still-used letter r/ర represented /ɾ/; Telugu had a tap/trill distinction which disappeared and now both of them are just allophones. The other 2 letters were super rare and only appeared in ancient inscriptions. 8:00 vijñānaṃ is never pronounced with a dʒ. it is /ʋiɟɲa:nam/ in my speech but ɲ is also a marginal phoneme that only appears in Sanskrit loans, so it can be pronounced like /ʋigna:nam/ or /ʋigja:nam/ 11:24 This is standard Telugu that's based on Andhra speech, the Telangana dialect dropped ɭ as a phoneme. 13:09 FWIW I only say ki and ni 14:44 Using 'adi' for a woman is indeed rude (well it depends on age social status etc but generally it's a good idea not to do that). There is also the gender neutral pronoun 'tanu' which you've missed. 16:12 There is 'enamaṇḍuguru' for '8 people' but it's kinda archaic. 'okaṭi' is never used for humans. 23:51 "The cat who didn't read" = "cadavalēni pilli". This also means "the cat who can't read" 26:32 There is another way to talk about possession, using 'daggara' ('near'), for example "nā daggara ḍabbu undi" = "I have money", literally "near me is money". This isn't used for inalienable possession. 27:10 It's 'kaluvu' not 'kalusu' Feel free to reply if you have any questions about Telugu.

[@risyanthbalaji805]

Is the ఱ /r/ the same as റ/ற ?

[@theodiscusgaming3909]

@@risyanthbalaji805 it is

[@anandsai9378]

The aspirations in those numerals come from the laryngeal *H in Proto-Dravidian.

[@pie1086]

You should do one about Tamil too! It's a really cool language and classical too!

[@jck956]

Telugu is such a cool language And I dabbled in it for a bit before actually deciding to learn Estonian but Thanks for reminding me that I absolutely need to return to Telugu someday

[@muhammaddarrenputra6389]

Im so used to conlang reviews that i thought this was a conlang. I was really like "huh? This conlang seems familiar, and the script is pretty nice too"

[@ItsPForPea]

Do you wanna try some southeast Asian languages next? Mainly any language in the Tai-Kradai family, it would be interesting to see people explaining how analytic languages work. Basically skipping all inflections and conjugations and spend the whole video explaining classifiers and registers/particles.

[@user-io7sh7nx7c]

I'm an ethnic Telugu speaker from Karnataka land. My community is more influential in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu than the Telugu states. We have our own dialect and it preserves more of the older Telugu vocabulary since we left Telugu land before the Golconda Sultanate's occupation and the subsequent introduction of very minute but still influential Persian vocabulary. Our dialect is also influenced by Kannada and Tamil.

[@SaiHarshithRachakonda]

I was born in India but moved to the US around age 5. I speak English with native fluency (as I grew up here in the States), but over the years, my Telugu stalled. Now, as an adult, I can speak Telugu fluently (and do so with my family) but I have to use many English loanwords for any topic on the more complex side. As a kid, I also knew how to read/write Telugu at a basic level, but forgot over the years. Over the coming year (as I have just graduated uni), one of my major goals is to get to complete fluency in Telugu. I want to applaud you for all your research going into the video - I have also struggled with finding good resources online in English so I really am in awe of how you got to such a good understanding of the language. For a native English speaker, I understand how the grammar can be completely foreign (as I myself as a proficient Telugu speaker find it challenging too haha). Props to you - great work and excellent overview!

[@watchyourlanguage3870]

Thanks, and I applaud you for putting in the work!

[@karthikaryan3109]

Thanks for making this video. I love Telugu Language alot. Always wondered how beautiful this language is. Through this video I learnt more about my favourite language.

[@majahadra7905]

This was very well put together :)

[@izimations]

now do Bengali (this is a threat)

[@novaace2474]

When verbs take up half of the video 💀

[@DmytroZinkiv]

అద్భుతమైన మరియు అందమైన తెలుగు భాష

[@amj.composer]

I am trying to learn Telugu. The resources online are non existent 😭

[@Rhythm412]

You can refer youtube, multibhashi app, devi studios app, language curry, 50 languages, telugu translate, also you can learn from other speakers online etc... I hope you learn 👍❤

[@based4560]

Try "Spoken Telugu for absolute beginners" and search up "Informal description of Telugu grammar". These two are best for a beginner. If you want more info, read Krishnamurti's Telugu Grammar.

[@harideepthanniru]

when counting humans 1 is okaru excellent video.

[@srikanthsidd9959]

Awesome video!❤

[@ren_.rg70]

I'm a native telugu speaker, and tbh, I think you might be better at speaking telugu than me, I'm originally from Hyderabad but emigrated at a young age so the telugu Ik is not so formal and is more based on hyderabadi slang which shortens a lot of words/uses the casual form/urdu a lot more. it took me a minute to understand everything 😂

[@ericgeorge873]

തെലുങ്ക് 🗣️🔥🔥🔥

[@sakthivelr7787]

தெலுங்கு 🗣️🔥🔥🔥

[@jeongbun2386]

Bro my pakistani self is going CRAZY rn. My mother’s side was from Hyderabad, and a lot of my family still speak Hyderabadi Urdu + have Hyderabadi cuisine, so this video kinda hits home 🤍

[@charithreddy23]

A Telugu here, Tysm for this video! :3

[@randomtexan]

As someone who speaks Telugu thanks for this video

[@based4560]

You from Dallaspuram?

[@alexmueller4047]

so here for branching out from pie languages :)

[@tj-co9go]

24:35 why does presninchu sounds so slavic? Almost Russian

[@anandsai9378]

Great! But there are few corrections in your video: 1. Proto-Dravidian is on average, dated before 2500 BCE and some findings also point it to 4000 BCE. 2. The number 60-80% Sanskrit words in Telugu isn't true. The influence of Sanskrit depends on the context. You would find 70-75% of Dravidian words in everyday speech. Infact, we also have a literary version called 'Acca Telugu', similar to the Anglish, a completely Dravidian-based Telugu literature. Refer the texts: yayāti caritra by ponneganti telagana. 3. Proto-Telugu is a 'freshly' split language from PSC family, which is totally based on reconstructions, and might probably contemporary to Vedic Sanskrit. Cheers!

[@sreekark9457]

Hey just a correction..its vignanam not vijnanam like g in ghana not in genius

[@lunan5197]

The idea of the North/South Aryan/Dravidian continuum is pretty shaky tbh. I feel like I really does depend on the specific region, language and even caste-specific dialect in a lot of cases. Plus a lot of people (mostly racist Northerners) use this idea to justify their lack of Dravidian heritage which is simply not true.

[@lunan5197]

Jesus Christ I thought Malayalam had insane grammatical rules

[@sakthivelr7787]

Oh hell no Malayalam doesn't even have grammatical gender inflection. Telugu is probably the most Dravidian (I don't know about Kannada and minor Dravidian languages)

[@lunan5197]

Yesss omg do more Dravidian languages

[@tj-co9go]

16:35 "the teens are a bit weird but that is expected" - okay boomer

[@lightray9264]

Your pronunciation is pretty solid but I think you’re stressing the wrong part of each word. In “చేస్తున్నాను” for example, you tend to put the stress on “న్నా.” You can still be understood but it sounds more natural when you stress the beginning of a word (the “చే” in “చేస్తున్నాను” for example). Other than that. Amazing work! This video’s helped me a lot with Telugu grammar and I’ve reached a decently competent level in the language now.

[@lightray9264]

Something else I should note is that words like నక్షత్రం and మేఘం are of Sanskrit origin and therefore sound very formal so they generally aren’t used as much as their native equivalents (చుక్క and మబ్బు) in everyday speech. Though it is important to note that different dialects have vastly different vocabularies. Telangana Telugu generally uses native Telugu words and Hindustani loans, Coastal Andhra which is the standard dialect uses native words and Sanskrit loans (but still prefers native words), and the Rayalaseema dialect has heavy phonological influence from Tamizh as well as favoring Native Telugu and loans from Tamizh

[@plazmagaming2182]

Bro Tamil is NOT this hard😭😭😭tf happened with telugu☠

[@candrealx]

If someone were to make a grammar breakdown of Tamil, I feel it will be equally as hard and is also a diglossic language so you have one more challenge as a Tamil learner (I know both languages)

[@based4560]

Telugu ain't that hard either, we just know when to use the grammatical rules from experience. By the way, Tamil has eight grammatical cases, Telugu only has 4.

[@perguto]

Why is there a retroflex d in the word for dolphin?

[@watchyourlanguage3870]

No idea, although the same is true for many other recent loanwords with D or T in them

[@risyanthbalaji805]

​@@watchyourlanguage3870 Indian languages use retroflex t,d for the English t,d and aspirated dental t/d for th. If the language lacks aspirations then dental t d is used for þ and ð. I guess because most Indians pronounce the t as a retroflex while speaking Indian English. So t is like subconsciously retroflex and th is dental to us.

[@someonerandom704]

I've actually been trying to compile resources for Telugu for a long time now, and I haven't had much success. Do you have any citations you could give me? Are most of the resources you've found in Hindi or Telugu, for instance?

[@watchyourlanguage3870]

Unfortunately, I haven’t had success either lol. For most of my knowledge about Telugu, I gained it deductively by grammaticality testing either my college roommate or Google Translate (yes, there’s a proper way to use it- this is a future video idea of mine). I suppose there are more resources in Hindi or Telugu, but I don’t speak Hindi at all and I don’t speak Telugu well enough to read academic articles. As far as resources I can recommend to you, there’s a paper on vowel harmony that I referenced in the video, Kolachina 2016. There’s also “A Grammar of Modern Telugu” by Krishnamurti and Gwynn, which I was somehow able to find a complete online version of for free, and I used it for wherever I had gaps in my knowledge before this video

[@sakthivelr7787]

​@@watchyourlanguage3870 looking forward for the Google translate video😇

[@colitipal]

Speaking of Italian of the East, why don't you do a language overview of Italian?

[@pchandu1995]

god damn, you really pronouncing them better than me wtf.

[@Indira-minuaga]

Um no t no shade just wanna be helpfull It's vigñanam not vidjna am the j +ñ make the gña sound as in Sanskrit languages and ఙ,ఞ makes the ng(as in English) and ñ as in españa. The ng letter is not used that much nowadays because people began to denote the sound which most often only occurs at the end of words in the standard version as ంగ but many Telanganian dialects including mine use that sound everywhere Vocalic r is a sad story that letter is bonkers i don't know why people stopped using it

[@Indira-minuaga]

The vocalic L (,i,e the L in the vowel list) is used upuntil the turn of the century people who know it still use it and the half circle historically was invented because the peasents (i e us) added an n sound where the upperclasses didn't bcuz they wanted to be close in similar to samskryuetum so poets invented it to denote the vocalic n sound while the full circle is only used (historically) for the vocalic m sound

[@hithere833]

Do you ever plan to learn a native american language? It would be awesome to see "language overview: Nahuatl" or "language overview: quechua"

[@watchyourlanguage3870]

Yeah, later this year I’ll start learning Cherokee (and there will be more native American languages for me in the future)

[@hithere833]

​@@watchyourlanguage3870I'm glad, I hope to one day see you cover Cherokee, there's not very many in-depth overviews of native languages

[@speedwagon1824]

You gotta make one on hindi

[@agorarcadon]

SWAHILI PLEASE! WE WANT SWAHILI!

[@Neversa]

There is a video about Telugu in russian Энциклоп channel

[@Rhythm412]

Bro, it's in Russian language also it may or may not have subtitles and it would be better if a person makes the video you already know and understand.

[@nativeamericangigachad9147]

Actually, it's about Tamil.

[@eduardo-bx4hw]

do an overview on latin

[@sudoranger1798]

retroflex consonants were not borrowed from Dravidian languages to indo-aryan languages, instead indo-aryan languages developed them from proto indo-iranic. e.g the ruki consanants that caused the (s) sound in proto-iranic to shift into a retroflex consanant.

[@language-Hobby]

Hello!!!! High school linguistics student here!!!!! How did you learn Telugu, and what resources did you use? I can't find many resources for it. Should I try private lessons? How long did it take for you to learn Telugu? Thank you!!!

[@watchyourlanguage3870]

@@language-Hobby My answer may not satisfy you but I’ll try anyway… As with every language I study, I put together a list of vocabulary and memorized it in pieces of like 3-7 words at a time, then went back and did 100 words at a time, and then all 1500 or so words. I wanted to use a dictionary but couldn’t find a reliable one so I gave in and used Google Translate (I have plans to make a video about how to properly use Google Translate as a language learner, probably some time next year). As for grammar, I used a combination of several Wikipedia articles, LanguagesGulper, and occasionally even academic papers (along with running grammaticality tests on Google Translate, yes, that’ll be in the video). I also had a roommate at the time who was a heritage Telugu speaker, so I asked him some stuff and ran some grammaticality tests on him too, that may be your best bet. It took me like 9-10 months to get to probably an A2 level

[@language-Hobby]

@@watchyourlanguage3870 Okay, thanks! I'm using flashcards and have a Telugu friend I can ask for grammar help (but he doesn't like to talk in Telugu so I don't know what I'll do). The only Telugu dictionary I've ever found in my search was one I found in person in the Seattle Public Library on a visit... it's probably been untouched now for months. It looked like it'd be great, but there was only one book for Telugu in that entire library! So, as far as I've searched there's only one Telugu dictionary in Washington (I live in Spokane). Thanks again!

[@bright218]

Can you do Malayalam? i really cant find any good videos on it, i would really appreciate it if you checked out my language

[@RainDownpours]

I've just noticed now that you add captions to your video. When did you start doing so?

[@watchyourlanguage3870]

If you mean the Telugu subtitles, that’s just something I do for language overviews. If you mean the English ones, I started doing that whenever KZbin added this new feature called auto-sync, which basically allows me to copy and paste the script into a text box, and then the computer syncs the words to my voice. It’s minimal effort so like, why not? And also it’s much better than the open captioning, especially for me since I’m inserting weird sounds and words from other languages, which open captioning just doesn’t know how to handle.

[@RainDownpours]

@@watchyourlanguage3870 I'm glad the auto-sync helped with the English caption! I like to turn on captions.

[@nafismubashir2479]

Telugu makes my head hurt it sounds so complicated

[@based4560]

It's not that complicated.

[@MusicLover-zz2tk]

I demand KZbin to let me give you a billion likes ❤❤❤❤. (మీకు కోటి లైకులు ఇవ్వడానికి నేను యూట్యూబ్ ని అపేక్షిస్తున్నాను).

[@crazybfg]

Is this standrad Telugu?

[@watchyourlanguage3870]

I think so but I’m not rly sure I can answer that

[@risyanthbalaji805]

​@@watchyourlanguage3870 Sounds like standard Telugu to me, but I don't speak the standard version I speak an unintelligible dialect.

[@creamcheese2436]

​@@risyanthbalaji805 yeah most people that speak telugu (from what i know) speak dialects that are almost COMPLETELY DIFFERENT than what the actual language is. If you'd travel to Telangana, instead of finding people actually speaking the language diligently, you'd find most people mixing in a lot of english sentences with their telugu. We don't say 'dhanyavadhalu' any more, just a simple 'thank you' is what we say.

[@crazybfg]

It is weird because my dialect tends to drop a lot of u sounds like naku become nak and perugu becomes pergu

[@watchyourlanguage3870]

@@crazybfg where are you from?

[@nexusanphans3813]

Good video, but you should have used proper romanization scheme instead of IPA when transliterating other writing systems. IPA is too hard to read.

[@tj-co9go]

14:40 wow, so many 3rd person pronounds

[@hugosetiawan8928]

Damn how can languages be so sexist

[@based4560]

It's not.

[@risyanthbalaji805]

The words have gender not the underlying concept it represents. Even my your logic in my dialect only adi is valid for she which is same the word for it, so standard telugu is a lot better ☠️☠️

[@NewLightning1]

Next time also use regular romanization and not just IPA. IPA makes langauges look harder than what it needed to be necessarily read

[@NewLightning1]

Especially indic languages because most of the time on the internet they would have been written using regular latin alphabet

[@midcentralvowel]

Your channel looked promising when I found it but with my ADHD and your unstructured presentation and way too fast pacing it’s honestly making me loose interest super fast, like I don’t wanna pause on every graphic that appears on the screen. 😓

[@Sciencedoneright]

Dude, representing Telugu with the state of Telangana is a criminal offense 😂 Telugu stemmed from a united Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana split off from us later

[@harshamarsha]

Calm down, it's still telugu that is spoken in Telangana, even if they split from us.

[@Sciencedoneright]

@@harshamarsha my comment was meant to be taken lightly

[@based4560]

​@@SciencedonerightWhich district of AP you from?

[@Sciencedoneright]

@@based4560 I wouldn't really like to reveal that on the Internet, sorry

[@based4560]

@@Sciencedoneright Fair, have a nice day.

[@SonGojit456]

సరే పద్యాలుకెళ్లి నేర్చుకో First-u

[@yackaquacker7992]

¿Por qué no escogiste otro idioma más útil en primer lugar? ¿Te parece una pérdida de tiempo?

[@leroyurocyon]

Porque no le convence

[@talideon]

Because Telugu is an _interesting_ language.

[@leroyurocyon]

@@talideonyeah 😀

[@cogitoergosum9069]

28:00 Fun fact: in Hungarian (another agglutinative language) this sentence would be: "a hétről beszélhetünk az orvosainkkal" [ the week-about speak-can-we.present_tense the doctor-our.plural-with ]