Dear June and friends,

this is interesting. Allow me to share my experience: it depends
whether you know any other language that employs declension and
conjugation, including (I think) Japanese. I am educated in English
and Chinese, Mandarin being my mother tongue. Both did not help me in
learning Pali. I know a little bit of Japanese, and I can relate it
to Pali grammar to the extent of my competency in Japanese.

To read the suttas, you have to be familiar with the different case
endings each word can take, so that together the sentence makes sense
logically and grammatically. Knowing the word-stems helps when you
have to look up a Pali dictionary too. If you know the word-roots,
you are already an expert.

Another area is that of sandhi, combination of words to form compound
word that may have totally different meaning. For example, in
English, a 'blackbird' is a type of bird, not any bird that is black.
Ven. Narada touches on a bit of that in his book. Completing his book
will make you comfortable enough to read Pali text with a dictionary,
just as a student starts to read the frontpage of a newspaper without
skipping words.

Better still is to understand the context each common word is used
(as the Word-by-Word series I work on), or to look at shorter
extracts first (books like Warder's and Gair & Karunatillake's do
exactly that).

Of course, you also have to have a good understanding of what
Buddhism is about. Just like reading an engineering text, you need to
have the fundamental technical knowledge that the author(s) assumed
you to have. Otherwise, you may misinterpret and even mislead others.


metta,
Yong Peng

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, june_tg wrote:
does anyone know, how long would it normally take an average person
to learn pali enough to be able to start reading the suttas without
that much difficulty? or is this not possible :p