Lesson 3: Writing the Consonants
 
Recall that, in Malayalam,
  letters may belong to these broad categories: | - equivalent to the vowels
| - equivalent to the consonants
| - conjugated letters
There are 36 consonants, 25 of which are clubbed into groups of 5 letters with closely related sounds. Each of these consonants have, in turn, about 14 other variants when you add each of the vowel 'sound' (not letter) to it. For instance, the first consonant, 'ka' has variants like 'kaah', 'ki', 'kee', 'ku', 'koo', 'kai', 'kow' etc. As mentioned earlier, these variants are obtained by writing the consonant along with a symbol/sign that represents the corresponding vowel equivalents (More about tthis in Lesson 4).
 
For a detailed view of all these consoants, click here