Learning Tamil 1: Aug 27, 2026

So I have been learning Tamil for the past few weeks since moving to Chennai. I can read the script now, although very slowly. I thought it would be a good idea to document new words and learnings at some cadence: every day or every other day. This is today's entry:

It was also interesting setting up a Tamil keyboard on NixOS. I was so glad to have Claude to do all of that work. I'm using m17n phonetic and it works predictably. I do hate that I had to move out of Neovim to not run into terminal rendering problems and although Zed is not that bad, even this breaks in multiple places when using Tamil input. Vim navigation with h,j,k,l stops working because they were probably tied to English input and there's apparently no easy way to fix this because Zed's keymap works at the level of key-event and fcitx5 sends committed text via Wayland.