learning tamil

Though I read lot of tamil novels and I have scribbled something under the name of புது கவிதை, my knowledge in tamil grammer is virually zero.Honestly I never took the pain to learn something seriously. It is one of the biggest costs I have paid for studying in an English medium -matriculation school in a rural area. All the subject were in English but staffs and everyone spoke in colloquial Tamil. There was a Tamil paper but it was always treated as something not a worth one. Net result products, which were half-baked in both languages. Well this can be seen just as blaming game, and one can ask me why didn't you take any effort to learn something by yourself. I accept it’s my fault, but what i try to say is environment is not much conducive to give an impetus.

My father is a Tamil teacher with a science background, but I never took pain to learn from him. Because of some unknown reasons I believed he is more interested in science than Tamil. Even in my higher secondary days we never sat together to prepare for my Tamil papers. I took an easy path of reading just novels and புது கவிதைகள். He used to ask me to learn thirukural, whenever he gets a chance. But I was always contended with easy to read stuffs.
It took some time for me to understand that whatever i read and admired and tried to replicate were not poems they were just beautiful lines. How can I experiment in something without understanding the basic of it?
I was searching net to learn my mother tongue. Even at this point I never thought I can get back to my dad. Accidentally I got a chance to read a piece of hymn in remembrance of a person written by him, then only it dawned to me,” I can learn from him". I have to speak to him on this and i hope at least in a year I can learn something from him