You will meet a Malayalam word of fifteen letters and your instinct will be to panic. By the end of this class your instinct will be to take it apart from the right-hand end — and you will usually be able to. Linguists sort languages by how they package meaning into words. Isolating languages keep one meaning per word — Mandarin, Vietnamese. Fusional languages fuse several meanings into one ending you cannot cut apart — Latin, Russian, Arabic. Agglutinative languages string together clearly separable pieces, each with one job. Malayalam is the third kind. That is why learning Malayalam quietly makes Japanese and Turkish less alien afterwards — same mechanism, same logic. Why the pieces do not always look how you expect. Malayalam — Manglish — English: സന്ധി — sandhi — "junction": the sound changes where two morphemes meet. Sanskrit made a science of it; Malayalam inherited both the phenomenon and the name. മരം → മരത്തിൽ — maram → maratthil — tree → in the tree. Not മരംഇൽ. A ത്ത appears at the join. പുസ്തകം → പുസ്തകത്തിൽ — pusthakam → pusthakatthil — book → in the book സ്ഥലം → സ്ഥലത്ത് — sthalam → sthalatthu — place → at the place ഭക്ഷണം → ഭക്ഷണത്തിന് — bhakshanam → bhakshanatthinu — food → for the food Learn that one pattern and long words stop being walls. Slow and clear, for English speakers, heritage learners and the Malayali diaspora. What is the longest Malayalam word that has stopped you? Post it and I will take it apart.