Lesson 2 - Describing the environment

🎯 Learning goals

In this lesson, we will start building simple sentences describing the environment and learning a few new words.

🫵 This / That

One important thing to know in Kannada is that there is no word for “to be”. This mean, we don’t say something “is” something. The word is usually just skipped. So, instead of saying “I am Manjunath” we just say - “I Manjunath” = Nanu Manjunath.

We can use this knowledge to form simple sentence and say what we see. For this, we need to know the words “this” (for things which are closeby) and “that” (for things which are far away).

Idu - This (is)

Adu - That (is)

For saying “this apple” or “that man”, we only say “i” and “a” instead of idu and adu.

I … - This (+noun)

A … - That (+noun)

So, we say “This is an apple” = Idu apple. We say “This apple …”, we use “I apple”.

Next, let’s learn a few words relating to our environment.

👤 Environment words

Mara - tree

Pakshi - bird

Bekhu - cat

Raste - street

Hassu - cow

Mane - house

Gaadi - car

Huva - flower

Angadi - shop

Gandasu - man

Hengasu - woman

We can use these words if we combine them with a few simple sentence structures we will learn next.

👇 There is / Is there?

To describe what is around you or what you can see in a picture, the following two words will be useful.

Here - Illi

There - Alli

There is… - … ide.

Is there…? - … idiya?

Now, if we want to say that you can see a cat in front of you, you say:

• Illi here - bekku cat - ide there is.

Let’s see a few more sentences:

• Alli pakshi ide. There is a bird
• Mara idiya? Is there a tree?
• Illi raste ide. Here is a street/there is a street here.

👍👎 Yes and no

Since we learned a question, we need to know how to answer it:

yes - Haudu

No - Illa

I don’t know - Gotilla

Now let’s practice! Use the vocabulary trainer and the practice page.

Go to practice page.