Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) Courses Available for Download

[Ichiro]

I purchased the Tamil, Gujarati and Marathi CIIL courses from Exotic India, books and CDs. (Not the book for the Marathi course, which they don't seem to have.) The audio for each course came on 3 CD's. For the Tamil and Gujarati courses both, a couple of the language tracks on the CD's were not readable, so I got most of the audio I paid for. For the Marathi course, they sent me two of the CD's sellotaped together, with the sellotape stuck on the machine-readable underside of one of the CD's! Of course, this means that the CD is quite spoilt, will not play, and I do not have fully one third of the Marathi audio content I paid for.

I asked them for a refund and they told me that since more than a week had passed since my receipt of the CD's without complaint from my side, no refund would be forthcoming. I don't care what they offer, I will not be purchasing from them again.

I left a rude review of the course on their website which, of course, they did not allow to be published.

[RyanSmallwood]

I also ordered some CIIL audio cds from Exotic India (Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam) at various points. I also had a similar experience were certain files on the CD were unreadable, though I didn't have anything quite as bad as mentioned above, in most cases I got all the audio, though sometimes only after cleaning the CDs. The quality did seem to drop between purchases, the first ones I got seemed to resemble an official release of sorts, whereas the later it seems like someone had just copied the files onto a generic blank CD and shipped it off. In the end I'm just glad I got audio for these while they were still available.

I still think its a great resource and the most convenient way to get ahold of it for anyone interested in these languages, but be aware you are rolling the dice with these.

[verdastelo]

Has anyone been able to login to the Bharatavani website recently? It seems it needs an SMS code now to verify your account, and I haven't been able to get around that yet.

An idiot must have told them about copyright. Thankfully, a lot of books from Bharatvani are on Archive.org. You can download them before the site goes down (will it?) because of a lawsuit in the US.

I purchased the Tamil, Gujarati and Marathi CIIL courses from Exotic India, books and CDs. (Not the book for the Marathi course, which they don't seem to have.) The audio for each course came on 3 CD's. For the Tamil and Gujarati courses both, a couple of the language tracks on the CD's were not readable, so I got most of the audio I paid for. For the Marathi course, they sent me two of the CD's sellotaped together, with the sellotape stuck on the machine-readable underside of one of the CD's! Of course, this means that the CD is quite spoilt, will not play, and I do not have fully one third of the Marathi audio content I paid for.

I bought four Tamil CDs to accompany my An Intensive Course in Tamil. Those CDs never worked. For good or for bad, Tamil is only Indian language with an imperfect script, so you cannot do without audio.

Here's an example: The endonym for "India" is भारत (bhârat).

Punjabi: ਭਾਰਤ (bhârat, pârat; the p sound represents a tone)
Hindi: भारत (bhârat)
Kannada: ಭಾರತ (bhârat)
Tamil: பாரதம் (bhâratam, pâratam, bâratam, pâratam, bhâradam, pâradam, bâradam, phâradam)

The first letter, ப, can literally have any of these four sounds: b, bh, p, ph
The third letter, த, can have any of these two sounds: d, t.

Although rules exist to help you, diglossia and exceptions make it almost impossible to ascertain the correct pronunciation without audio.

Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam are Dravidian languages with scripts that contain letters for Dravidian and Sanskrit sounds. So I'm glad I picked Kannada first. It has only one difficult sound for Hindi speakers, ಳ. But even that letter is present in my native Punjabi.

[Vordhosbn]

If the CDs are in any way damaged or unreadable, you can simply request customer service to send you a downloadable link to the audio files, with proof of purchase. I did this just now after reading this thread.