Tuesday, October 20, 2009

School Days...

Today is Tuesday. Tuesday is the one day in the week when I have no free periods during the day, so I'm always pretty busy. However, today we had "zero period" again for Annual Day preparations and so we all (excluding the 12th grade) got an hour at the end of the day to do whatever. Those who are participating in the competition go and practice, while others work on homework or sit and chat with friends. I spent my zero periods the last two days working on my Tamil. I wrote down a few more words, and spent some time practicing writing my name. While writing, the PT (play time) teacher came over to where I was sitting with a few friends around me and asked me to write his name. He showed me how to write it and then let me practice a few times before telling me what the name was- it was Daniel! Daniel, an English (or so I thought) name could be written perfectly in Tamil. When writing other names such as mine or my family's, it's hard for my "teacher" for the time to figure it out because there is not an exact translation. They basically have to sound out each sound of the name and then put a Tamil letter in that sounds the same or similar. My name for example, written in Tamil sounds a lot more like "Med-ee-sun" than Madison, because there are not exact letters for the sounds in my name. The sounds is the Tamil language....CRAZY!!! They are so hard to pronounce, and not only that a lot of them have the same sound, but the length that you hold out the note is a different length of time. For example: There is a few different letters that are pretty similar to write, and sound the same, but one is pronounced "na" one as "naa" and one as "naaa" (the sound is not "na" exactly either, it's more like "llgna," but I'll spare you the difficulty of that pronunciation!).
After my brain had been expanded enough for the day, my friends and I discussed cute Tamil movie stars and we sang the song that I've been attempting to learn called "Sutrum Vizhi." The girls were all in agreement that I needed to see some more of the Tamil stars and THEN decide which ones I thought were handsome, because at this point I am in love with Surya- who is definitely the heartthrob of the Tamil movie stars. When I told the girls this, some of them agreed, but a few of them disagreed. I asked them why, and their answer was "he's old. He's 35 or something, and he's also short." I laughed when they said this. I told them "Brad Pitt has got to be older than Surya, and I still think he's the hottest thing alive!"

4 comments:

Piriyanga said...

PT stands for Physical Training and not play time....

Rianna Pauline Starheim said...

it's awesome that you're learning tamil for real! :)

ps in my school pt is play time too

Rob and Sara said...

Hi, Med-ee-sun!

When you meet someone in India with a nice "English" name like Daniel or George or Matthew or Lawrence or Mary or Ann, it usually means they're Christian.

There are lots and lots of Christians in Kerala and many in Goa, but they're a teensy-tiny minority in most of India.

Sadly, I'm not familiar with Tamil movie stars — but some of the guys in Hindi movies are definitely HOT!!! :D

Good luck with Tamil. It'll be awesome if you can learn the language. And, especially, the pronunciation of names.

Sah-ruh

knox.madison said...

Thanks Sara! Yea the language is really interesting- the writing is SO cool! Does your name only have two letters then? I know the letters for the two sounds, "sah" and "ruh" so is that all?? My name has five letters, but a lot of the names here have SO many!

Yes...Surya! It's really only his voice that I'm very much attracted to. He's pretty handsome, but his voice is just AMAZING! (his "voice"- all movie stars have playback singers that sing their songs...for all of you who didn't know...)