Dear Nina and friends,

thanks, Nina. First, let me wish you a safe and pleasant holiday.

I think our sutta translation exercises are quite well done, although
there are rooms for improvement. Each sutta (or section for AN1) comes
with its own vocabulary list, and the exercise is done in the
trilinear format, which is consistent with the other Pali exercises we do.

I have attempted a full grammatical analysis, but I have to drop it as
it was too time-consuming and added little value to our exercises.

I am always exploring ways to improve my efficiency and quality of the
English translation. I have been consulting several online tools,
including the online PED, and dictionary.com. Sometimes, I even
consult Wikipedia. I have also consulted the English translations on
metta-net and, wherever possible, on ATI. All these consultations are
done prior to posting the weekly exercise to the group. As I will be
making a trip to Singapore in June, I hope to gather more tools, such
as the PTS edition and the BPS anthology of AN.

I also hope to develop tools that we can use to improve the efficiency
and quality of our translations. I shall discuss this probably at a
later date.

The original plan was to have two posts a week. That plan was somehow
thwarted, but I hope to recover the two posts per week plan in the
future. At our current pace, we would be completing AN1 in August. I
hope some of our members would join in the preparation of the exercise
as we move on to AN2. In this way, it become a group's effort, and
team participation makes learning more interesting.

That's all I have for now.

metta,
Yong Peng.

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, nina van gorkom wrote:

As I wrote to you off line, I will be away from Friday until May 18
and could not catch up all the mails. I would like to listen to you
about your general remarks about the contents and way of presentation
of the suttas so far. I remember you said something about this
already. This makes the Pali study very much worth while.