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Comment by primitivesuave | Hacker News Reader

I learned Sanskrit by translating the Bhagavad Gita (https://gita.pub), and I experienced a similar jump in comprehension to what you described. At first I needed to look up every word, even the ones I'd seen many times, but eventually (after many many repetitions) I finally started having an intuitive idea of what the words and sounds meant.

It certainly makes you appreciate the unbroken oral tradition by which these enormous works of literature were passed down.

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I have seen some people do this successfully. But I find the BG to be too complex as a learning tool. It is too dense for me to concentrate on the words rather than the content.

I prefer short stories. I have acquired hundreds of laghukathā collections over the last couple of years and read from them as time permits.

I am working on two Sanskrit-related things at the moment:

- a website where I am putting up proof-read stories from scanned copies of old issues of the Sanskrit Chandamama

- a "Sensible Guide to Samskritam" that will use the Baroda Critical Edition of the Valmiki Ramayana as the foundation to construct a single story told across 100-odd bite-sized chapters. This will essentially be a Sanskrit version of Lingva Latina.

The Valmiki Ramayanam is a much more accessible document than the Gita to learn Sanskrit from as an advanced learner after completing the basics. There's the aspect of a story that unfolds progressively which is nice and engaging, as opposed to the deep metaphysical stuff in the Gita.

The first section of the Ramayanam is the Sankshepa Ramayanam, or, the Ramayanam in summary. This gives the outline of the whole story which then is expounded in detail in the subsequent sections.

What sounds nice, and works, in poetry may not work when narrated in prose.

So, I am avoiding the first four sargas of the Balakanda entirely in my guide. The story starts with a description of Ayodhya and then moves on to Dasharatha and his family. I want to keep things simple and linear so that the story has momentum and readers feel like continuing the story.

I will have to find a way to incorporate all the side stories without damaging the momentum. Will probably add them as "side quests" at the appropriate juncture.

> after completing the basics

I have to disagree here. Best to jump in directly using glosses (will start with an English one. Might add a Hindi one at a future date). This fetish for basics is a big hurdle that I have personally experienced.

You will never be confident enough to start reading the Ramayana no matter how much you study the language because it is a game of vocabulary.

You need vocabulary to understand things. And the only way to acquire vocabulary is to read a lot.

In my experience of having learnt Sanskrit via what I now realize is the comprehensive input method (thank you for introducing that term to me via your comments on this thread), I absolutely think that the "basics" - enough to recognize the seven (eight if you count the sambodhana) vibhaktis (declensions) and the simple past, present, future and the subjunctive tenses - are required in order to get past the huge roadblock of parsing a word.

Once parsed, I can look up the meaning of the word on ashtadhyayi.com or elsewhere, but not before.

Sanskrit grammar is complicated enough for basic knowledge of the cases and the tenses/aspects/moods to be less useful than one would otherwise assume. You have sati-saptami prayogas, krdantas are often uses as adjectives while basic text books talk about them in limited contexts. It is a huge mess.

Take this story (https://www.adhyeta.org.in/sa/k/samskrita-chandamama/198404/...). Assume you have a gloss available for some words. Do you really need to know the pratyayas for the nouns and verbs for you to be able to understand the story?

I wasn't referring to knowledge of the Paninian sutras or pratyayas, to be clear, when I said "the basics".

For this story, you don't need to know the pratyayas but you do need to know the tenses, the ktva-lyap forms, etc to fully understand what is going on. With only an incomplete knowledge of those aspects, one can sort of intuit the overall meaning but eventually would find that they had the wrong idea altogether when reading the corresponding translation in a language they know.

I read a story by Roberto Bolaño recently where the Spanish-speaking protagonist reads novels in French, a language he cannot speak. He said that even though he couldn’t understand most of the words, he usually understood the plot. For some reason your comment made me think of this.

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