Greetings from Samskritapriyah, Chennai, India. In these pages you will find information relating to Sanskrit and also a set of basic lessons to learn the language through self study. The lessons have been presented in a unique manner allowing you to read the Devanagari script easily without having install any special font or software. Almost any browser on any system (Microsoft Windows, Linux, Macintosh or other Unix machines) will be able to correctly display the text of the lessons.
Learn Sanskrit through self studyPlease enable the display of inline graphic images in your browser to be able to view the lessons properly. Please see the note at the end about enabling the images.The inline images for the Sanskrit lessons are generated on the fly from special text files prepared using the Multilingual Software developed at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, at Chennai, India. This approach more or less guarantees error free display of the text on almost all the systems running a web browser.
Apart from the lessons, these pages also carry interesting information relating to Sanskrit that is generally not known outside India.About the Lessons
The series of twelve lessons is aimed at giving the student a reasonably good introduction to the language. The student will be able to frame sentences relating to daily activities in life and thus will gain enough confidence to converse in Sanskrit though with a smaller vocabulary to begin with. The structure of the lessons is quite different from that of lessons found in conventional Sanskrit primers. It is hoped that the twelve lessons would provide enough details for the student to understand the basic grammar of Sanskrit and sentence formation rules.
Background required for following the Lessons
The approach taken here does not assume any knowledge of Sanskrit on the part of the student. The student is also not required to know the Devanagari Script. It is assumed that he/she is familiar with the terminology of English Grammar. Children may also be able to follow the lessons, if parents are able to explain to them the meaning of the grammatical terms used in the lessons. The Devanagari text will be shown along with Roman Transliteration using standard diacritical marks to help understand the pronunciation of the letters and words.Interaction with Web Administrator
If you would like to interact with us either to seek clarifications on the lessons or to address other issues relating to Sanskrit, you are welcome to send your requests via email to the address given in contacting Acharya.
Inline images
In most browsers, the default setting permits viewing images. However, almost all Browsers provide a feature to disable viewing of images. Inline images are often disabled to prevent them from being downloaded and displayed, often for reasons of excessive download times. Images have the advantage that they will be properly displayed on almost all browsers. This is the reason for sending the contents of the lessons in the form of images.
These lessons were first made available on the web in the year 1997. Over the years, we have received warm messages from thousands of readers who have benefited from the presentations here at the Acharya site. We would appreciate hearing from you about the usefulness of the presentations. Please send your views to contacting Acharya .
Glossaries
(Ready reference for words)
Sanskrit
dictionary
(Online reference
Monier Williams Dictionary)
Sanskrit and Science
Sanskrit Literature
Multilingual Editor
(Use this freely downloadable application to prepare text in Devanagari script for deployment on the web)
On
Sanskrit
(General Information about
Sanskrit)