I love the secret language bit. I always speak Japanese in public and it is great fun. Once, though, I met a couple at an event and I recognized them from a time I was at a starbucks speaking about very personal affairs in Japanese. It turns out they were from Japan. Embarrassing.
If kannada is difficult to learn, the same can be said of Telugu, whose script is close to kannada. And Hindi which also follows the same script rules (forming composites from consonants and vowels using Devanagari script). This is so much true that Sanskrit is often printed in Kannada script in my state without any loss in phonetics and "spelling"
Tamil might be harder to learn as it is not phonetic. there is no unambiguous way to write 'ha' and 'ga' for instance. Mohan (a proper noun) is written mokan and called mogan.
So says a native kannada speaker who can speak 3 other languages, read 4 and comprehend a couple more.
My talent for scripts is very unusual, but I think that any person could probably learn a phonetic script in maybe a few weeks at most.
Your humility is very refreshing Mr Kragen.
It's not a particularly important talent, since as I said, orthography is far from the most important part of learning a language; if it were, I might feel embarrassed about bringing it up.
But in context, it's important to point out that my experience with learning scripts probably doesn't generalize that well, and normal people's experience will be an order of magnitude worse. If you have a way I could have explained that without either sounding conceited (to you) or simply not mentioning my experience at all, I'd like to hear it.
This isn't really true. Kannada has a (relatively) regular structure.
Starting from scratch the most "difficult" of the four South Indian languages is probably Malayalam - the language of the state of Kerala. (note to hackers - the language name is a palindrome!)
It combines influences of Sanskrit and Tamil with a very unique pronounciation (to untrained ears Malayalam is more "flowing" and "liquid" vs the other South Indian languages which are more "staccato"). It is almost impossible to pick up the correct pronunciation and lilt of Malayalam without some deep immersion.
That said, I knew an Englishman,Graham Hall (now deceased unfortunately) a journalist/author who spoke fluent, accentless, perfect Malayalam. An incident where he chastised a local plumber trying to rip him off (no doubt assuming the blond foreigner was clueless about the local cost of repairs and prices of parts and such) in fluent Malayalam, with perfect slang, indicating what he thought of the plumbers' parentage and ancestry, made the local papers. (The thoroughly nonplussed and chastened plumber refused to take payment for his work and fled as soon as he could!)