Lesson 1 - Introduction
Telugu is a dravidian language spoken by the people of Andhra Pradesh.
It is derived from the word Telinga, which is same as Trilinga, meaning country of the three lingams(from the Sanskrit tri three and linga the emblem of Siva). There is a tradition that the God Siva, in the form of a lingam, descended upon the three mountains named Kaleswaram, Srisailam and Bhimeswaram, and that these three lingams marked the boundaries of the country.
Telugu is remarkable for its melody of sound, which has gained for it the name of Italian of India. Even Mahakavi, Bharathiyar in his poetry mentions Telugu as sundara Telugu(beautiful Telugu).
In common conversations, a single word, or short phrase is often used to convey the meaning of a whole sentence. Pronouns and the verb to be are frequently omitted.
Telugu, like many others, may be viewed as consisting of three branches, namely 1 - common conversational languages, 2. the language of prose books and 3 - the language of poetry.
Telugu language has 16 vowels and 36 consonants.
Vowels can either written on their own and when they combine with consonants they take the form of vowel signs. In the lessons to follow you will learn to write and recognize the alphabets of the telugu languages using telugu writing videos.
Watch the above video and see how the vowels occur on their own in the words. The pictures and english transliteration help you to sound out the word. In the telugu writing video you can see how to write them.