Why KannadaMaadi exists
I moved to Bengaluru from North India and quickly realised that no existing course taught the Kannada you actually hear on the streets — at the auto stand, at the darshini, in a Koramangala office.
About the founder
I'm Deepanshu — born and raised in North India, now living in Bengaluru. I moved south for work and stayed for the food, the weather, and the people. The one thing I couldn't get past in the first year was the language gap. Most days are workable in English and Hindi, but the small interactions — the auto driver, the maid, the elderly neighbour, the vegetable cart — those happen in Kannada, and being shut out of them makes you feel like a permanent tourist in the city you live in.
I'm not a linguist. I'm a product builder. So I did what builders do: I tried every Kannada app I could find, hired tutors on three different platforms, watched YouTube channels, bought textbooks. Most of them taught me to read the script before I could say "how much is this?" — which felt like learning to read sheet music before you've ever heard a song. The few that did emphasise speaking were unstructured, expensive, or both.
After about a year of muddling through, I had a working spoken Kannada — built mostly from immersion, repetition, and being patiently corrected by friends and shopkeepers. KannadaMaadi is that path, productised: the structured, audio-first, Bengaluru-flavoured course I wish existed when I started.
Find me on LinkedIn → · Email: hello@kannadamaadi.com
The gap I was trying to fill
Duolingo doesn't have Kannada. Most apps that do teach Kannada lead with the script and isolated vocabulary — useful for tourists, useless for actually holding a real conversation with an auto driver or a neighbour.
What I needed was something like immersion, but structured enough that a busy professional could do it in 15–20 minutes a day — story-driven audio conversations that build real spoken fluency without grinding through grammar tables.
The result is KannadaMaadi: entirely original Kannada content, grounded in Bengaluru life, built on a pedagogy that puts listening first.
Anu and Ravi
The course follows two characters across 21 conversations. Anu is from Delhi — a professional who has moved to Bengaluru and is determined to genuinely belong, not just survive. Ravi is a born Bengalurean from Basavanagudi, patient and proud of his city.
Their relationship is strictly a platonic friendship. No romance, no hierarchy — just two people navigating real Bengaluru life together. The situations are pulled from actual city experience: the auto meter argument, the darshini breakfast, the office chai break, the landlord conversation.
Why audio-only?
Kannada script (ಕನ್ನಡ) is a full syllabic writing system that takes months to learn even to read slowly. Most Bengaluru newcomers don't need to write or read Kannada — they need to understand and be understood in spoken conversation.
KannadaMaadi uses transliteration (Roman letters) and native audio voices so your ear leads. Once you can hear and reproduce the sounds naturally, learning the script becomes optional and much faster. We don't block the script — we just don't rush it.
How it was built
Lesson content was drafted with Claude (Anthropic's AI) under a structured per-lesson spec, then reviewed line-by-line for accuracy, naturalness, and cultural fit. Audio uses ElevenLabs Kannada TTS voices. Every lesson is checked against a CEFR-aligned outcomes list before publishing, and gated for a native-speaker listening pass before going live.
The course is a progressive web app — it installs on your phone like a native app and plays audio offline once you've loaded a lesson. No app store required.
Try the course
Lessons 1–3 are free, no signup required. Start with Lesson 1: meeting and greeting — a short conversation between Anu and Ravi on her first day in Bengaluru. You'll hear what spoken Kannada actually sounds like in under five minutes.