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Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Sanskrit Pre-Primer
Review: Egenes' book is excellent as a pre-primer. It presents enough information in its 18 lessons to give the beginning Sanskritist a firm foundation for progressing to a more difficult Sanskrit primer.Covered are the basic uses of Classical Sanskrit's 8 cases; paradigms for 9 nominal declensions; a small list of verbs showing present, imperfect, future, and gerund forms; tables for external sandhi, and coverage of two internal sandhi rules. The introduction to the Devanagari script is excellent. It goes beyond other primers and shows you how to actually write the characters. Plus, the text is large and very easy to read. It is well-worth the price.
Rating:
Summary: Start here!
Review: If you're interested in the Sanskrit language, whether for linguistic or philosophical reasons, this is the book you should start with. It introduces the script and the grammar in slow, gentle steps. After about 7 lessons, you ease into the different kinds of external sandhi (sound changes and assimilations from one word to another). By the end of the first volume, you've learned a suprising amount: most of the major declensions, and been introduced to the verb, and the principles of compound formation.
Every lesson has plenty of exercises, both English to Sanskrit and vice versa, to test your comprehension and to give you practice. The answers to the exercises are given in the back of the book. Just a great, great introduction to the language. After finishing Book I, you can continue with his Book II, or pick up, with confidence, any of the standard academic introductions - Maurer, Goldman and Sutherland, Deshpande, even (gasp!) Coulson. I wish every ancient language had an introductory book like this.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: This book is wonderful. The chapters are manageable enough for me to do one a day, and there is a considerable amount of vocab introduced for a pre-primer. If you want to learn Sanskrit, this is the book to get!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: This book is wonderful. The chapters are manageable enough for me to do one a day, and there is a considerable amount of vocab introduced for a pre-primer. If you want to learn Sanskrit, this is the book to get!
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