Customer Reviews

A Concise Elementary Grammar of the Sanskrit Language: With Exercises, Reading Selections, and a Glossary (Asian Studies)

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The classic Sanskrit grammar is, of course, Whitney. It, however, includes Vedic Sanskrit and very rare forms. Jan Gonda provides a basic, understandable grammar that covers everything a first year student needs to know. His straight-forward style also makes this volume useful for Indo-European historical linguistics classes where the intent is to understand the basic structures of the "Indo" branch. In short, I recommend this highly as a starting point.

The book is exactly what the title indicates, concise and elementary. It is a great book to use in a class, with a teacher who can explain what it all means. It is not at all suitable for self-study. If you want to learn Sanskrit on your own, try Coulson's Teach Yourself Sanskrit.

First the good points: First few pages, dealing with the script, are rather good and clear in presentation. Those pages, that can be seen scanned on the site, attracted me to buy this book.

Now, the bad points: All the rest of the book. Instead of clear explanations and tabular presentation of noun declensions and verb conjugations, that I somehow expected to get, all there are are pages after pages of obscure paragraphs more meant to confuse than to explain.

Let us look at Page 43, Conjugation, § 57. Preliminary remarks, II, which is supposed to explain Sanskrit moods and tenses:
"The moods are: indicative, optative, imperative; only the present has three moods, the remaining tenses only the indicative; the infrequent precative is, however, a kind of aorist optative. The tenses are: present and imperfect, which form the present system with opt. and pres.imp., future, the rare conditional, aorist, perfect."

Precative? aorist optative? pres.imp.? And it gets worse and worse.

I really cannot recommend this book. I wasted my money and time on it. Instead I recommend "Introduction to Sanskrit" by Thomas Egenes. It is a very user-friendly book that can actually teach you something about Sanskrit.

I am totally of the same opinion with serbian friend who commented on this book three years ago.Please buy Thomas Egenes' 'Intros to Sanskrit 1 and 2'. Avoid Whitney and Gonda.