The biggest hindrance to start reading Malayalam fluently is the sheer number of letters in the alphabet. It has nearly 200 letters including all the ligatures. This presents a challenge to first time learners of Malayalam script. 

Conventional approaches

Letters first approach – Most adults learn Malayalam script by trying to study all the letters blindly first and then trying to read. But this is difficult since we have around 200 letters and symbols.

Easy letters first approach – Many Malayalam texts and tutorial videos introduce easy letters like റ, ര first. But still in the first chapter itself, the words and sentences used to teach റ, ര will have other letters and ligatures and symbols which will take the help of a native reader to understand and read. 

Aashaan approach

All Malayalam letters and symbols were prioritized according to their frequency of usage in normal Malayalam content like news, blogs, stories and novels. Then these were grouped mostly into three letters/symbols per unit.

Each unit only has words and sentences containing only letters and symbols learned in that unit or a previous unit. This decreases dependence on a learned teacher to start reading. Each of these words and sentences were curated/created after hundreds of hours of sheer imagination and creativity.

For comparison, in English if we introduce six letters like C,O,N,S,A,T then we can create sample words like
CAT, SAT, ON, AT, COT, NOT etc
and sentences like
CAT SAT
CAT ON A COT
CAT SAT ON A COT
NOT A CAT
NOT A COT etc.
These sentences and words are easy to learn to start reading.

But in Malayalam if we introduce, റ,ര,മ,ന,ത,ക,വ,ല to a student, how many meaningful words or sentences can we create with these letters? Aashaan tries to solve this problem. Let us see some samples