Re: Online Pali Textbook

Dear all,

I am thankful to various people for the great resources available to learn Pali. But I am hoping to learn Pali like I would learn any other spoken language of today.

There is a revival movement in Classical Sanskrit in different parts of the world today, whereby people learn Sanskrit as if it were a regular language for conversation. Samskritabharati in India and the USA conduct programs whereby one can learn to speak in Sanskrit. Here are some Youtube video links to such classes.

Part 1

Part 2

Of course, the teaching style works very well for people who are already familiar with a cognate language. But it works moderately well, for even those that are not so familiar, if they work with some patience - a very valuable dhamma. I too learned Sanskrit in this form, can speak the language quite fluently now, which of course helps me understand cognate languages like Pali rather easily.

But I was hoping to find something of that nature in Pali too. I am sure there have been people speaking Pali even until early 20th century. If anyone were to start teaching through speaking, I think that would be an excellent contribution to help improve our understanding of the language and the culture of ancient India. We can understand the language much better if we use it regularly.

In India there is an ancient Tamil proverb which is translated into English as "One learns a culture by living the language, and he learns [the language], by speaking and hearing [it]".

Thanks,

Balaji

On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 7:41 AM, Yuttadhammo Bhikkhu yuttadhammo@... [palistudy] <palistudy@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

What's the main problem with the DPR as it stands? I've had trouble updating the plugin lately; it seems Mozilla no longer supports self-hosted plugins and I can't upload it to their site.

On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 2:43 PM vojislavkovacevic@... [palistudy] <palistudy@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

Ven. Yuttadhammo,

There are already good pali books in existence, maybe the time can be better spent by bringing the DRP to perfection? DPR is indispensable and what you have done for us who are learning pali by writing it cannot be adequately described, but as good as it is it is not perfect, which is a shame.

For pali grammar, I am using Ven. Narada Thera's book, an Elementary Pali Course (EPC). But I am actually not using the book anymore. I've made a html file which contains all the grammar from the book without the exercises, and a smart and super easy to use navigation. I can upload that for you to see if interested ( and others as well ), but my point is that maybe the contents of my file can be added to if there are things missing, but it's I believe pretty much complete as it is now ( if you consider EPC to be more or less complete ).

My point is, using my pali grammar html file based on EPC, a perfect DPR and english tipitaka translations which are available, it would be as easy as it could be to learn pali.