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Complete Sanskrit
It's easy to teach yourself Sanskrit!
"Complete Sanskrit: A Teach Yourself Guide" provides you with a clear and comprehensive approach to Sanskrit, so you can progress quickly from the basics to understanding and writing Sanskrit with confidence.
Within each of the 24 thematic chapters, important language structures are introduced through life-like dialogues. You'll learn grammar in a gradual manner so you won't be overwhelmed by this tricky subject. Exercises accompany the texts and reinforce learning.
Features: One and five-minute introductions to key principles to get you started Lots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on the author's many years of experience Tests in the book and online to keep track of your progress Extra online articles at www.teachyourself.com to give you a richer understanding of the basics of the language
"Complete Sanskrit: A Teach Yourself Guide" provides you with a clear and comprehensive approach to Sanskrit, so you can progress quickly from the basics to understanding and writing Sanskrit with confidence.
Within each of the 24 thematic chapters, important language structures are introduced through life-like dialogues. You'll learn grammar in a gradual manner so you won't be overwhelmed by this tricky subject. Exercises accompany the texts and reinforce learning.
Features: One and five-minute introductions to key principles to get you started Lots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on the author's many years of experience Tests in the book and online to keep track of your progress Extra online articles at www.teachyourself.com to give you a richer understanding of the basics of the language
- GenresLanguageLinguistics
432 pages, Paperback
Published January 14, 2011
5 people are currently reading
86 people want to read
About the author
Michael Coulson
21 books3 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 10, 2019
Not a gentle introduction by any means, but doable if you pace yourself (to the content rather than the page count) and take decent notes.
Part of the difficulty is down to the authors assuming, as they mention in the preface, a greater degree of sophistication in students of Sanskrit than in students of living languages, which is fair and actually really nice—it's good to have a language course that doesn't feel the need to explain what an adjective or a verb tense is. The flip-side is that they also don't or barely explain what an ablative or an aorist are, and the text can get a bit heavy on philologist jargon—I can't imagine trying to work through it with zero experience with Latin and/or Greek (especially Greek is helpful, though I'm lacking in that department myself). Then again, if you don't have any experience with Latin or Greek, you probably shouldn't start with Sanskrit anyway—a lot of the things that make it such an extraordinary language will go over your head—and a willingness to stop and just google terms you're even slightly shaky on will go a very long way.
Most of the problem is the authors' fashionable and even defensible decision to use real-world Sanskrit passages as soon as is humanly possible, and introduce grammar as required to deal with them. There is an attempt to maintain some degree of sensible structure, but the order in which concepts are introduced is necessarily a bit haphazard after the fifth chapter as a consequence; it doesn't help that they're trying to fit what's usually a multi-semester university course in a little over 200 pages (not counting appendices, which are mostly vocabulary and exercise answer keys).
And, of course, Sanskrit is just a complicated language.
(Surprisingly not a problem at all is devanāgarī, the script. It's introduced, and the authors would obviously prefer you take the time to learn it—and transcription exercises are provided at the end of every chapter—but it's not required, and the book itself mostly stops using it in the text after the fifth chapter; I didn't bother.)
If you keep these things in mind and work conscientiously, though, the lack of hand-holding filler does mean people who don't need it can make a great deal of progress very quickly. I wouldn't necessarily like to have to use Complete Sanskrit for a course I'd be graded on, but for self-study I found it more than adequate.
It really is an astonishing language.
Part of the difficulty is down to the authors assuming, as they mention in the preface, a greater degree of sophistication in students of Sanskrit than in students of living languages, which is fair and actually really nice—it's good to have a language course that doesn't feel the need to explain what an adjective or a verb tense is. The flip-side is that they also don't or barely explain what an ablative or an aorist are, and the text can get a bit heavy on philologist jargon—I can't imagine trying to work through it with zero experience with Latin and/or Greek (especially Greek is helpful, though I'm lacking in that department myself). Then again, if you don't have any experience with Latin or Greek, you probably shouldn't start with Sanskrit anyway—a lot of the things that make it such an extraordinary language will go over your head—and a willingness to stop and just google terms you're even slightly shaky on will go a very long way.
Most of the problem is the authors' fashionable and even defensible decision to use real-world Sanskrit passages as soon as is humanly possible, and introduce grammar as required to deal with them. There is an attempt to maintain some degree of sensible structure, but the order in which concepts are introduced is necessarily a bit haphazard after the fifth chapter as a consequence; it doesn't help that they're trying to fit what's usually a multi-semester university course in a little over 200 pages (not counting appendices, which are mostly vocabulary and exercise answer keys).
And, of course, Sanskrit is just a complicated language.
(Surprisingly not a problem at all is devanāgarī, the script. It's introduced, and the authors would obviously prefer you take the time to learn it—and transcription exercises are provided at the end of every chapter—but it's not required, and the book itself mostly stops using it in the text after the fifth chapter; I didn't bother.)
If you keep these things in mind and work conscientiously, though, the lack of hand-holding filler does mean people who don't need it can make a great deal of progress very quickly. I wouldn't necessarily like to have to use Complete Sanskrit for a course I'd be graded on, but for self-study I found it more than adequate.
It really is an astonishing language.
March 3, 2016
The tone and content of the book is set by this line in the Preface: "It seemed practical to assume a somewhat greater degree of sophistication in potential students of Sanskrit than in students proposing to teach themselves a language such as French."
In a way, that Preface sentence should prepare you for a language learning experience unlike any other (unless you've studied other classics, Ancient Greek, Old Chinese, etc.). Forget about 'conversation' -- you never learn "hello" or "how are you", and one of the first sentences you translate is "We grieve because they are dead".
Although there's a lot of information presented, the narrative isn't as cohesive as it could be and some sections are significantly lacking. For example, Chapter 1 introduces the script versions of numbers, but not how to pronounce them (it is given in the appendix). Chapter 2 has a section called "(Verb) Prefixes" that consists of the following text, verbatim: "[prefixes] may modify, sometimes considerably and sometimes not at all, the basic meaning" -- and nothing else, except some examples! No further explanation of generalizations or what to look for. Why even mention it? Chapter 4 introduces four noun cases without so much as a whisper of a paradigm table. You're meant to consult the appendices but at this point we aren't told how to deal with the various types of stems. In Chapter 6 he makes the bizarre choice to eliminate in the text completely the use of the native nāgarī script, a choice I find incomprehensible, and basically harmful to the learner. In no pedagogical situation is learning through the transliteration over the native script anything close to a good idea. Sure, there's operations of sandhi complicating running text, but that's a challenge that's meant to be faced. Not handicapped.
The only testing material included are translation exercises of passages to and from Sanskrit. I once thought these exercises tedious, but I was reminded of the Prefatory remark and the author probably intends for you "the sophisticated learner" to invent drills for yourself on paradigms and other little details in the chapter text. Another important note in the Preface shouldn't be ignored: it is pretty much impossible to match the translations into Sanskrit perfectly since there's always some weird subtle word order shift going on. If the author didn't mention this, I'd pretty much Rage Quit this book since my word order precision dropped to something like 20% starting Chapter 3 onwards. Part of this is due to the author's admirable attempt to prepare the reader for all the variation and subtleties in real texts. The problem with this approach is that absolutely every topic and example is hedged to meaninglessness. This example from Chapter 5, introducing indefinites: "The addition of an indefinite particle, usually either CIT or API, turns the interrogative pronoun into an indefinite." (p. 64). There is no further explanation on the difference between CIT or API and I wasn't able to discern any from the examples. Is there an exception to the "usually", is there some other particle you haven't mentioned? It's as if he wrote a Spanish textbook and said "sometimes we use SER and sometimes ESTAR" or "the word 'corner' is translated as ESQUINA or RINCÓN" without explaining the difference. Explanations like these characterize the whole text, so you must be able to tolerate this and subsequently the mentioned imprecision in exercises, since at any point there are dozens of such variables in the air. I am fully aware that natural language is most readily described by these waffling statements, but boy it makes for an infuriating learning experience.
The information you need is probably here. Included are comprehensive appendices (useful only once you learn how to use them), a good-sized bidirectional glossary, and an interesting section (used with Ch. 15) about classical poetry meter. The answer keys are good, containing transliterated versions (which HERE are helpful). I'm about halfway through; I've learned a lot, sure, but I can't help but wonder if there's a less arduous path.
In a way, that Preface sentence should prepare you for a language learning experience unlike any other (unless you've studied other classics, Ancient Greek, Old Chinese, etc.). Forget about 'conversation' -- you never learn "hello" or "how are you", and one of the first sentences you translate is "We grieve because they are dead".
Although there's a lot of information presented, the narrative isn't as cohesive as it could be and some sections are significantly lacking. For example, Chapter 1 introduces the script versions of numbers, but not how to pronounce them (it is given in the appendix). Chapter 2 has a section called "(Verb) Prefixes" that consists of the following text, verbatim: "[prefixes] may modify, sometimes considerably and sometimes not at all, the basic meaning" -- and nothing else, except some examples! No further explanation of generalizations or what to look for. Why even mention it? Chapter 4 introduces four noun cases without so much as a whisper of a paradigm table. You're meant to consult the appendices but at this point we aren't told how to deal with the various types of stems. In Chapter 6 he makes the bizarre choice to eliminate in the text completely the use of the native nāgarī script, a choice I find incomprehensible, and basically harmful to the learner. In no pedagogical situation is learning through the transliteration over the native script anything close to a good idea. Sure, there's operations of sandhi complicating running text, but that's a challenge that's meant to be faced. Not handicapped.
The only testing material included are translation exercises of passages to and from Sanskrit. I once thought these exercises tedious, but I was reminded of the Prefatory remark and the author probably intends for you "the sophisticated learner" to invent drills for yourself on paradigms and other little details in the chapter text. Another important note in the Preface shouldn't be ignored: it is pretty much impossible to match the translations into Sanskrit perfectly since there's always some weird subtle word order shift going on. If the author didn't mention this, I'd pretty much Rage Quit this book since my word order precision dropped to something like 20% starting Chapter 3 onwards. Part of this is due to the author's admirable attempt to prepare the reader for all the variation and subtleties in real texts. The problem with this approach is that absolutely every topic and example is hedged to meaninglessness. This example from Chapter 5, introducing indefinites: "The addition of an indefinite particle, usually either CIT or API, turns the interrogative pronoun into an indefinite." (p. 64). There is no further explanation on the difference between CIT or API and I wasn't able to discern any from the examples. Is there an exception to the "usually", is there some other particle you haven't mentioned? It's as if he wrote a Spanish textbook and said "sometimes we use SER and sometimes ESTAR" or "the word 'corner' is translated as ESQUINA or RINCÓN" without explaining the difference. Explanations like these characterize the whole text, so you must be able to tolerate this and subsequently the mentioned imprecision in exercises, since at any point there are dozens of such variables in the air. I am fully aware that natural language is most readily described by these waffling statements, but boy it makes for an infuriating learning experience.
The information you need is probably here. Included are comprehensive appendices (useful only once you learn how to use them), a good-sized bidirectional glossary, and an interesting section (used with Ch. 15) about classical poetry meter. The answer keys are good, containing transliterated versions (which HERE are helpful). I'm about halfway through; I've learned a lot, sure, but I can't help but wonder if there's a less arduous path.
August 8, 2013
A good book if you have some previous knowledge on Sanskrit, but for a total beginner it may not be a good choice. I am a total beginner and it was pretty confusing for me.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews