First comment, I think it follows the rule but delete if not.

I am just beginning my Sanskrit studies as I will need to learn before I go to grad school. I just bought the The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit and Devavanipravesika: An Introduction to the Sanskrit Language as they were recommended by my professor who has a PhD in Buddhist studies.

Has anyone used these resources and are there other resources I should be aware of?

This dictionary is available for Android:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lpt.knswami

kosha.sanskrit.today gives you results from almost all well known dictionaries

There is no software to translate sentences afaik... If you find some let me know :)

If you are interested in the Bhagavad Gita I recommend Winthrop Sargeant's translation which has an excellent grammatical word by word analysis. This will help you understand more about the subtlety and meaning behind the words and also understand how many words spring from the same root (dhaatu). Then it's less a matter of learning lots of vocab and more about learning how many words are connected and a bit more about their construction. It's less heavy going than I may have made it sound. EDIT: This version has a "look inside" on Amazon so you can see the information available on a typical verse: https://www.amazon.com/Bhagavad-Gita-SUNY-Cultural-Perspectives/dp/0873958306/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1532594095&sr=8-4&keywords=winthrop+sargeant&dpID=418jsjneF4L&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch

I am assuming you can read devanAgarI. Here is a link to rig veda with all the 10 mandalas.

https://archive.org/details/RgVeda

Go the the appropriate sUkta (in this case 10.125) and see the accent marks on the words. Basically there are three/four kinds of swaras.

• anudAtta - low accent, if there is a horizontal line below the syllable.
• udAtta - high accent, if there is a vertical line above the syllable.
• swarita - no accent, ordinary syllables without any diacritic marks on them.
• dErgha swarita - this is not considered to be a special accent. It is just the accent you get when an udAtta is placed on a long vowel.

It is difficult to explain how to read the rig vedic text correctly via words. But you can get a general sense by reading the text (that I put the link here, i.e. with diacritic marks) and listening to the same being read by traditional scholars. Good luck.

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/20376797

Read the book above. It will give you a good overview of how things work in the ashtadhyayi. At that point, you can study with a traditional method, or a non-traditional method, and they will both be far more effective.

As I mentioned before, if you want to follow the "laghu siddhanta kaumudi" method, Bhimasena Shastri's commentary is very, very good. It is basically the traditional instruction in book form.

What exactly do you mean by literary criticism? Do you mean the close reading and analysis of a specific work or set of works, or do you mean theoretical treatises on literary aesthetics.

Pollock's Rasa Reader, that dragumannus pointed out is a good example of the latter but not so much the former. Anandavardhana' Dhvanyaloka (https://www.amazon.com/Dhvanyaloka-Anandavardhana-Abhinavagupta-Harvard-Oriental/dp/0674202783) is mostly the latter (a theoretical work) but he does a close reading of a variety of poems as part of the development of his theory, so there is some of the former there as well.

For purely stuff in the former category, I suppose the closest thing to this in premodern India is the commentarial tradition. But I am not sure if what they are doing is exactly the same as literary criticism. For an interesting look at the nature of commentary in Indian literature, I would recommend: Text to Tradition The Naisadhiyacarita and Literary Community in South Asia by Deven M. Patel.

For modern literary criticism regarding Sanskrit works: I recommend Alf Hiltebeitel's Rethinking the Mahabharata: A Reader's Guide to the Education of the Dharma King.

Also basically anything by David Shulman (though he tends to focus on South Indian regional languages more than Sanskrit). In particular, I would recommend his book, The Wisdom of Poets: Studies in Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit. Also his papers on Nala and the Uttararamacharita are quite good: On being human in the sanskrit epic: The riddle of Nala and Cruelty and Compassion in Bhavabhiti's Uttararamacharita.

Also, Emily T. Hudson's Disorienting Dharma: Ethics and the Aesthetics of Suffering in the Mahabharata is good.

I think it’s great to learn and memorize the sūtras…eventually.

But why not learn the grammar using a modern method first? I see no reason to learn grammar directly from the sūtras—it would only be more difficult for you.

You do know that the 3990 sūtras were written for an audience already learned in Sanskrit wanting to approach their language in a formalized way, right? What you say you want to do is like a person with no English knowledge whatsoever trying to read “Oxford Modern English Grammar” or “The Elements of Style.”

It makes very little sense to go about it that way.

English Translation

>अथ प्रथमोपदेशः
atha prathamopadeśaḥ
>
>Tr. Herein begins the first instruction

Sandhi Rules in Saṁskṛta

When two words conjoin, by virtue of certain Sanskrit rules (called Sandhi Rules, where the former word means conjunction) the ending of Word 1 and the beginning of Word 2 morph together to accommodate themselves into a new form and thus subsequently causes some loss of some syllables.

Those with a trained eyes will be able to identify that, it was originally:
prathamaḥ upadeśaḥ

One of the sandhi rules:

>aḥ + u = o

And therefore when applying this rule to these 2 words, we see that:
prathamaḥ upadeśaḥ → prathamaḥ upadeśaḥ → prathamopadeśaḥ

Here we see two things that has taken place:

1. the middle words have merged and in turn transformed into a single letter
2. the space in between those two words has disappeared in the merging process.

Recommended Resource: Book as a Learning Material

Since you are aspiring in learning sanskrit via a yoga treatise like the Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā, I therefore would go about recommending you to get the book titled Yogāvatāraṇam by Yoga teacher Zoë Slatoff-Ponté and this amazing book comes not just with the teachings of the yoga but also is accompanied by sanskrit learning in addition to online audio resources from the author for free in matters such as helping you in getting the pronunciation right etc.

SiddhantaTattva and it was published in Pandita Magazine in Vikram Era 1957. Same volume is available on archive.org. The image you have is of a book which collected the scattered text from all volumes of The Pandit Magazine and consolidated as a book. I don't have this edition though. Recently a new edition of this book was published with author's own commentary called SAMPRADAYANIRUPANA by Dr Ratna Purohit after she published the same as her PhD Thesis. To purchase head to : https://www.amazon.in/gp/product/819305377X

Of course! Everything will be double-checked by someone else so mistakes (if there are any) will be weeded out.

I'm busy too, so I'm not going to set a deadline for when this will be done - people can chip in when they have the time and join/leave the group whenever. Maybe a realistic timeframe for us busy folk would be sometime before the end of the year.

At the moment I'm setting up an open board on Trello (https://trello.com/) to organise things, and Skype is always useful. I'll update this thread when I have some details. :)

​

Books: https://www.samskritabharatiusa.org/They have an India website also. Unfortunately the book does not have too many exercises/worksheets.This is the book I use - https://www.amazon.in/Samskrta-Subodhini-Sanskrit-Michigan-Southeast-Studies/dp/089148079XIt is a little expensive and the learning curve is steep (my opinion). So learning from this requires hard work. But it has lot of translation exercises. Unfortunately no answers. But you could ask your queries in this forum or other Sanskrit forums. In addition to this book one may need to spend a little time memorizing noun and verb declination. Small booklets with such tables are available, you may find many free online.

Mishka Sinha is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Cambridge

http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/directory/dr-mishka-sinha

Access link:

https://www.academia.edu/4371615/Mishka_Sinha_Orienting_America_Sanskrit_and_Modern_Scholarship_in_the_United_States_1842-1894

AFAIK, the works of Carvaka are only cross-referenced by later authors. The best summary I can find is the first chapter of Sarva-darsana-sangraha.

Here is a great app by the Madras Sanskrit College that has a audio translation of several prayers among other works, and publishers one new Shloka every day.

Here is a copy available in Sanskrit.

English

Always a pleasure to talk about Sanskrit--especially with people who share your love for the language!

If you're interested in learning more about the Paninian approach, I would recommend the 4 volume series Introduction to Panini by PB Junnarkar (amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Panini-Sanskrit-Grammar/dp/1491264160). Junnarkar was a mathematician who, in retirement, wanted to write a gentle introduction to Panini. Based on what I've read so far, I think he succeeded--as much as anyone could succeed, at least.

You may still need a reference to the Ashtadhyayi to look up the rules Junnarkar mentions. The one at ashtadhyayi.com gives the sutras a well as excellent sanskrit-language explanations of each sutra. There is also the Ashtadhyayi 2.0 project (here: http://panini.phil.hhu.de/panini/panini/), which gives sutras, English translations, and hyperlinks linking relevant sutras together.

I use Spoken Sanskrit for web and Sanskrit Dictionary for Android. The Android app doesn't look as bad as it does in screenshots.