Devavanipravesika: An Introduction to the Sanskrit Language

The purpose, in writing this book, is to provide a self-contained primer, workbook and reader for teaching first-year Sanskrit students with no previous linguistic training. The author has tried throughout the work to introduce, explain and illustrate the most significant features of the language through verses, quotations, and readings. To these ends the grammar has been, in several areas, simplified to prevent the beginner from being more hampered than is absolutely necessary by relatively insignificant paradigms, rules, and exceptions. Upon completion of this course, students should have a real working knowledge of the major outlines of Sanskrit sentences with some facility and read, with the help of a dictionary, approximately five to ten verses of the Valmiki Ramayana or a similar text an hour. This primer provides material for approximately the first twenty weeks of an elementary Sanskrit Course. Each of these lessons is followed by a graded reading passage which specially illustrates the forms introduced in that particular chapter while providing increasingly sophisticated use of previously acquired material. These reading are also of cultural value as they form, together, a concise retelling of the main story of the Valmiki Ramayana from the curse of Dasaratha to the abduction of Sita.