Kannada tuition, Class 1 to 10

The Kannada Language Learning Act, 2015 - Karnataka Act No. 22 of 2015, in force from May 2015 - requires that Kannada be taught as a compulsory language in all classes in all schools in the state, either as a first language or as a second language, introduced in a phased manner from Standard 1 and extending up to Standard 10. Schools must use the textbooks prescribed by the State Government for teaching Kannada.

The Act defines a school broadly: schools run by the State, by local bodies and by any private educational agency, including minority institutions, whether aided or unaided. So this applies to a CBSE school in Whitefield and an ICSE school in Indiranagar exactly as it applies to a government school.

The Act also provides that a student whose mother tongue is not Kannada, and who has not taken Kannada as a first or second language, may study her mother tongue as a third language.

What that means in practice for a family that has just moved: your child will be learning Kannada, it will be examined, and if the move happened after Standard 3 she will be starting several years behind classmates who began at Standard 1. None of that is a comment on her. It is a timetable fact, and it responds well to being treated as its own project rather than absorbed into general homework help.

Kannada script is learnable and it is not learnable quickly, and the most common mistake is treating it as a few weeks of alphabet practice.

Three layers have to be secured, in order.

• The base letters. Vowels and consonants, formed correctly rather than approximately. Letters that are half-learned in the first year cause guessing for the next six.
• The vowel signs. Every consonant combines with every vowel through a mark that attaches to it, changing the shape. This is the layer where most children stall, and it needs teaching one sign at a time across many words rather than as a grid to be memorised.
• Ottakshara. The conjunct consonants written beneath the line. Children who skip these read the top half of a word and produce something that is not a word, which is exactly the same failure that matras cause in Hindi and is just as invisible from the outside.

For a child starting from zero in Standard 4 or 5, securing all three is a term or two of focused work. Attempting the textbook before the script is secure is the reliable way to make a child conclude she is bad at Kannada, when what she actually is is unable to read it yet.

The most common mistake in Kannada classrooms is one the teacher can hardly avoid: teaching a room where most children hear the language every day, at a pace that assumes it. For the child who does not, the vocabulary is simply missing, so decoding a passage correctly still leaves her with no meaning.

The approach that works is the one used for any second language.

• Sound before symbol. The child hears and says a word before being asked to read it. Reading a word she has never heard is a far harder task than reading one she knows.
• Vocabulary from her own life first. The words for things in her house, on her plate and on the way to school, before the words in the chapter.
• Speaking every class. In a group class she answers in Kannada several times per class. Without spoken practice the written work never becomes more than decoding.
• Comprehension in Kannada, not through English. Translating every sentence into English in order to understand it is a habit that gets slower every year and has to be broken early.

There is also a real advantage worth naming to a child who is discouraged: Kannada spelling is far more regular than English. Once the script is secure, what she sees is what she says. That is a genuine relief after English, and telling her so is worth doing.

A Karnataka child in a private school is frequently handling three languages by Standard 6: her first language, English, and Hindi as the third. If the family speaks a fourth at home - Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali - she is managing four sets of sounds and up to three scripts before she turns twelve.

Most children manage this perfectly well. What causes trouble is when nobody notices which of the languages has quietly become the weak one, because the marks get averaged and the weak subject is written off as the one she is not good at.

Two things help, and neither costs money.

• Decide which language is which. Which is her strongest, which is the school's medium, and which she genuinely never hears outside class. The last one needs the most support and usually gets the least.
• Fix scripts early. A half-learned Kannada or Devanagari script makes every reading task in that language exhausting for years. It is a term of work in Standard 3 and considerably longer by Standard 5.

We teach from Bengaluru, so this is familiar ground. Classes run online across India and abroad, with a small number of in-person places in South and East Bengaluru - both are on the fees page.