--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, Nina van Gorkom <vangorko@...> wrote:

>
> Dear Dave K,
> This is personal, but I do not believe so much in hard rote
> memorization. I believe in context, that is reading. As you go

along,

> taking Pali suttas next to English, it will come naturally.
> I did not translate from English into Pali. In the end you remember
> also the other way round, without all that effort and time. You
> should also like Pali reading, not just see it as a hard exercise.
> Nina.

Nina,

Thank you. This is kind of what I thought, but I think I need to hear
it from others. I realize that languages are typically easier to
understand (heard or read) than to communicate with. This is kind of
a universal law and it partially mitigages the daunting task of
learning Pali for me and keeps me going.

Although I still think conversational Pali would be neat.

I would really like to be able to "read" Pali and not just
painstakingly translate word for word. I assume the key to this is
just to read the same text repeatedly until it shines from the page
with the same sort of clarity as an English text would. Does that
make sense?

I have an idea of some good places to start, like the Anguttara
Nikaya. One of the exercises in the Gair book is to translate some of
the lines from it. With the amount of repetition it looks like that
would be a great starting point. Obviously there is a great deal of
repetition in the canon, but I'd like to find more like that one.

-DaveK