Satsya Tharien

Mangalore-based Satshya Tharien is a content creator and senior content strategist at an ed-tech startup. It is tough to miss her bubbly posts. Because when it comes to her content, she is essentially sharing her learnings in the most creative way possible. She calls herself a serial hair dyer, is the Queen Bee of language hacks, and shares the occasional financial advice you wish you knew. This food-obsessed enthusiastic cutlet is our dose of happiness, or as we like to call our happy pill.

Even though Satshya is a Malayali, she rarely visited Kerala. She lived all her life in Karnataka and would travel to Tamil Nadu or Mysore to meet her grandparents. A trip to Kerala would have happened only to attend a few weddings. As such, she lost touch with the language. When she was younger, she thought Malayalam was too uncool and would refuse to speak it, and unfortunately, she missed out on speaking it every day. So now she is trying to make up for the lost time. Apart from the linguistic aspect, she also found Malayalam difficult because she faced a lot of ridicule from other Malayalis. This has made me extremely hesitant to talk in Malayalam before other Malayalis.

But she is slowly learning and getting more confident. The lockdown gave her a chance to look back at her language roots, and she decided to give learning Malayalam a chance. She enjoyed speaking to her parents in Malayalam, and was determined to improve it. That is when she noticed how so many words are similar yet familiar to her, and she wanted to share her learning process with people. Growing up speaking in Kannada, Tamil, and Malayalam, it was always a big jumble in her head. Like Desham in Malayalam is anger, but Desha in Kannada is country. So, she would use visual cues to remember words from different languages.

The method is earring in Tamil, so she would always picture a frog earring (toad). Regarding similarities, she found that the Kannada script is very close to the Telugu script. Malayalam and Tamil share a lot of common words. But it is certainly not true that if you know one South Indian language, you will automatically learn all of them. She learned so much through making her Hacks to Learn series, and hopes others have too. Many people are jingoistic about their mother tongue and look down on other languages. English and Hindi are the primary victims of this hate.