Sanskrit: A Complete Course for Beginner's

by Michael Coulson

Functional and fun, each course offers full pronunciation guides, grammar summaries, dialogues, cultural notes, vocabulary charts, and irregular verb tables. Ideal for complete language study from comprehension, to speaking and writing skills, to understanding the culture.

Genres: Language, Linguistics, Reference, Nonfiction, Textbooks

513 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.

Reviews

[Gary Donnelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am seeing progress with this book, but I have been using this in conjunction with (to a lesser extent) the Maurer Sanskrit textbooks - both have their uses but if you intend to 'learn' Sanskrit in any meaningful sense then I think it is best to use the books in conjunction with a Sanskrit teacher. Others have noted the issues re misprints (there are a lot!) and the poor quality of devanagari - this seems to be exacerbated from chapter six onward, where the script appears to be printed in a smaller size than in prior chapters. This may seem a minor gripe, but for beginners it really does make life rather difficult. I also found that Coulson addressed the cases of address rather haphazardly, doing half a job in the appendices rather than spending sufficient time on them in tbe main body of text; this might be because he assumes knowledge of other Indo-European languages, specifically of Latin. For us younger students, this is an assumption too far (though the book was published in the 70s, I think). Coulson also spends a lot of time talking about grammatical features and paradigms that are largely irrelevant to students like me who are reading Sanskrit in order to study Indian philosophy - not everybody is a grammarian! Overall, the book is helpful and it has proved valuable in my making rapid progress with Sanskrit, but I stress that this progress has come in conjunction with regular meetings with a PhD supervisor fluent in Sanskrit who can address things omitted from the book. Still, it is definitely worth perusal by any budding student of Sanskrit.

[Butsuri]

Sanskrit