I've built what I believe is currently the best free, online resource for learning Malayalam from scratch. It is based on a textbook and related materials made available by the University of Texas at Austin (UT) which are available under the Creative Commons License.
It is a full University course with grammar lessons, vocabulary, and audio clips. I've used those to also build Anki decks for flash cards.
A significant obstacle here is that I don't speak Malayalam well. I'm actually creating this site as a means to learn Malayalam myself. I can understand basic conversational Malayalam and read some simple words but I'm not fluent at all in the language.
However, the original textbook (https://ml.matj.io/Moag-Malayalam-CompleteTextbook.pdf) is very old and made from scans of pages. It is not very accessible, easy to use or easy to correct. I spoke with a professor from University of Chicago about the textbook and she noted that it's not perfect but it's probably the best resource we have for learning Malayalam from scratch.
I started work on this a few years ago before I really used AI harnesses and was copying and pasting from Gemini web which had the best OCR + context window combo at the time. Now, the technology has progressed to where OCR is no longer a significant obstacle. I was able to transcribe the textbook and make straightforward corrections with Codex + GPT 6.1 Sol.
I was also able to automatically transcribe and split the vocabulary audio clips provided by UT. I had to manually verify some of them but the process was pretty seamless over all, especially once I began using a Malayalam-specific speech to text model.
LLM translations from Malayalam to English were also impressive and very helpful.
I've built what I believe is currently the best free, online resource for learning Malayalam from scratch. It is based on a textbook and related materials made available by the University of Texas at Austin (UT) which are available under the Creative Commons License.
It is a full University course with grammar lessons, vocabulary, and audio clips. I've used those to also build Anki decks for flash cards.
A significant obstacle here is that I don't speak Malayalam well. I'm actually creating this site as a means to learn Malayalam myself. I can understand basic conversational Malayalam and read some simple words but I'm not fluent at all in the language.
However, the original textbook (https://ml.matj.io/Moag-Malayalam-CompleteTextbook.pdf) is very old and made from scans of pages. It is not very accessible, easy to use or easy to correct. I spoke with a professor from University of Chicago about the textbook and she noted that it's not perfect but it's probably the best resource we have for learning Malayalam from scratch.
I started work on this a few years ago before I really used AI harnesses and was copying and pasting from Gemini web which had the best OCR + context window combo at the time. Now, the technology has progressed to where OCR is no longer a significant obstacle. I was able to transcribe the textbook and make straightforward corrections with Codex + GPT 6.1 Sol.
I was also able to automatically transcribe and split the vocabulary audio clips provided by UT. I had to manually verify some of them but the process was pretty seamless over all, especially once I began using a Malayalam-specific speech to text model.
LLM translations from Malayalam to English were also impressive and very helpful.
More technical details here: https://ml.matj.io/#/technical-notes
Source: https://github.com/matjic/malayalam