Dear Yong Peng

Thank you for your kind and encouraging words. I knew Nina is Dutch and
a great scholar, she wrote a treatise on the abiddhamma in Dutch.
I hope in the end I can learn Pali sufficiently good enough to be able
to translate texts into Dutch. But I guess it will take me a few years,
if ever, to learn the necessary skills. (But: The task that is never
started takes the longest to complete!)

I have started with making an exercise for all the declensions of nouns.
I will upload it to the files. After studying Pali primer lesson 1-8 and
the elementary course lesson 1-5 one should be able to make this
exercise. I had to give the answers myself, and for me it worked to
enhance my understanding of the declensions.

I hope someone with more understanding of the language will have a look
at it. I discovered that I have no spelling checker in pali on my
computer. A few words are in italics, I doubt if they are correct.

Kind regards,

Ria

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, "Ong Yong Peng" <palismith@...> wrote:
>
> Dear Ria and friends,
>
> thank you, and a great welcome to Ria and all new members.
>
> Ria, I am glad to learn of your interest in Pali. I am also a student
> myself. It is also a virtue in Buddhism that we continuously learn and
> improve ourselves. We can also apply these principles to our work and
> household lives.
>
> I hope you can remain active with the group. There are in fact many
> Dutch members here, the most prominent being Nina, who has been an
> excellent mentor to myself and many others.
>
> I thank you for the files you have uploaded. I will take a look at
> them again when I have some spare time this weekend. The exercise
> suggestions you made are great. You are always welcome to lead any
> discussion beneficial for the group. You are also welcome to
> participate in our AN translation exercise, which is resumed this
> year. There is also the postings Florent and I make, and the Saddaniti
> discussions by our more advance members.
>
> I am also glad that you are also computer literate. Many of the
> contents in the mailing list are worthy to be captured on the web, but
> organising these material is too much for me. I am investigating ways
> of doing this, but some little help will be great.
>
> I am proposing the slides because that is something I can work on
> without much assistance. The slides can incorporate voice and music to
> be multimedia, or the voice and music can be added to the slides to be
> video later. Is there anyone happy to lend his or her voice? ;-)
>
>
> metta,
> Yong Peng.
>
>
> --- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, grasje wrote:
>
> I am still a studens wrestling with the first lessons of the Paali
> primer. I study at home, I have no teacher around. the biggest beed
> for me would not be slideshows but more and more varied exercises.
> (audio-files would be great, though) I hope that once I have finished
> Da Silva's book I can start reading some texts, and that it is then
> possible to study the dhammapada (on the taiwanese site), or the
> anguttara nikaya (in the digital pali reader), and thus combine
> pali-study with real texts.
>
> For now, I can only work with the available course-material. The
> translation exercises require a lot of dicipline (I know it is a
> buddhist virtue). More exercises and variation in the exercises would
> make it a lot easyer for me to hammer the declensions and conjugations
> into my head. Exercises like: "read the story and answer the
> questions". "find all genitive cases in the story". "Put the next
> sentences into plural if the sentence is in singular, put them into
> singular if the sentence is in plural" "fill in the missing
> declensions in the next sentences", "give the full declensions in
> singular and plural of the next words" "give the full conjugation of
> these verbs", "write the next words in the correct alphabetical
order".
>
> Of course I am willing to help in making exercises like this, and
> provide the answers, but someone who knows a bit more than I do should
> check the answers.
>



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