Sanskrit

by Michael Coulson

Book Overview

Learn a language from the comfort of your own home With Teach Yourself Sanskrit Complete Course , the series brings to life this ancient language, allowing you not only to learn the literary and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0340913363
• ISBN13: 9780340913369
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Excellent book, but not for complete beginners

I found Coulson's "Sanskrit" a wonderful book, dense with information. However the title "Teach Yourself" is a misnomer: I cannot imagine someone with no prior knowledge of ancient languages making profitable use of it. Like the reviewer below, I am fortunate enough to know Latin and Greek already, and I'm also familiar with Hindi and the Devanagari script. (I'm also fluent in French, another language with which Coulson also assumes some familiarity). If I didn't already have this background, I don't think I'd be able to make head or tail of this book. Unfortunately, as many other reviewers have said, Sanskrit just is a really hard language (far harder than Latin, Greek or Hindi in my opinion), and there's no getting around that basic fact. Coulson aims to get you up to a very high level by the end of the book, and he has to go at a lightning pace to do that: however I would suggest a more gently-paced introduction to readers who don't already have a substantial linguistic background.

The best book for beginners

This is by far the best introductory book for those interested in studying Sanskrit seriously on their own. The book is not easy, but then, neither is Sanskrit. Coulson presents Sanskrit grammar clearly, and his exercises are extremely useful. Completing this book will make it possible for a student to read relatively simple Sanskrit texts with a dictionary on his or her own.

Ancient and sublime

I got this text by Michael Coulson, then head of the Department of Sanskrit at Edinburgh University, Scotland, about twenty five years ago. I was studying religious studies, and wanted to be able to understand the primary scriptures of the primary religions of the world in their original languages as much as possible; I've had a reasonable facility with languages in terms of reading, and found that Coulson's book fit my style of learning rather well. There is a useful, pull-out sandhi grid early in the book, that shows consonants and vowels. This does not show all possible combinations, but most of the basic ones. This is a hard thing to remember (rather like learning the difference between written English and spoken English, where the pronunciations colloquially vary depending upon accent as well as position in the sentence or the speed of talking). Sanskrit is a langauge where it isn't necessary to learn the entire alphabetic structure for writing at the outset -- Coulson recommends this as a gradual process, and I agree with this idea. The primary Sanskrit font described and used here (a common Sanskrit font throughout India, although far from the only one) is the nagari script. Sanskrit is a part of the Indo-European family of languages, but that being said, it is vastly different from English, and the student of this book would be well-advised to make sure she or he has a good command of English grammar ideas, and the willingness to not attempt to apply them to the Sanskrit sentences and passages presented. Coulson in his introduction makes the distinction between a learned language and a natural one, as well as a dead language and a living one. Sanskrit to a Western student is both a learned and a dead language; to the late Sanskrit writers, it was both learned and living -- very roughly parallel to the Latin used in academic circles in the Middle Ages, a language still living in a sense, but not a natural language for anyone. Sanskrit has much greater fluidity and variation over its incredibly long history; Coulson introduces bits and pieces of these strands, but stays fairly close to a classical Sanskrit represented by the most common and widespread of religious texts. There would be only one item where I really feel I must take marks off, and that would be the constant use of transliteration into Latinate script rather than using the Sanskrit throughout the models. While almost all of the reading passages are in the Sanskrit basic font style, the various grammar points (conjugation and declension charts, etc.) are presented in transliteration, which made things a bit more difficult for me, as I'd sometimes have to struggle not only to remember the Sanskrit but also the code for the transliteration (which, of course, never coincides with the transliteration paradigms in other langauge texts I've studied). This book is designed both for classroom use and for self-study. Based on my readings and comparisons of my transla

An excellent, though challenging, book

Teach Yourself Sanskrit by Michael Coulson is, in my opinion, a thoroughly excellent method to learn sanskrit. From the beginning of the book to the end, information was presented in a straightforward manner and provided relevant information about Indo-European history and linguistics. The biggest problems that I had with this book was the sheer amount of information presented per unit: in order to complete the exercises, one must first spent quite a long time with the material contained within that respecive unit. This book is not for everyone, however, as it assumes that its students already will have quite a large background in linguistics. Its language and method of presentation would be, I think, unintelligable without prior studies in Latin or Ancient Greek. Altogether, this book is an excellent book if you are already moderately accomplished in this or related fields. It is definitely not for the beginner.