Customer Reviews

New Course in Reading Pali (Entering the Word of the Buddha)

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2 star:		(1)
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Such a book does not have the pretension to cover the whole language of the canonical Buddhist texts, but it contains enough stuff to enable you to navigate in and understand most canonical Buddhist texts. The authors chose to give some texts first at the beginning of each of the twelve lessons, then the necessary lexicon, and then the explanations of the main syntactic facts present in the texts, though not enough if you want to understand everything. You will miss a few details, except if you use outside tools, such as a dictionary and other grammars, to find out these missing details. Don't worry! You will not get to the end of it, because there is no perfect and absolute tool. You will have to spend at least ten hours on each chapter and you will know a lot at the end because you will have learned just the same lot. The book has one flaw though. The authors probably do not believe in honesty, faith and love of hard work on the side of the users or learners. The authors do not give anywhere in the book a translation of the texts. And that is a real want, a real shortcoming. I found quite a few words that are not in the lexicon of the book, nor in any dictionary. Too bad for us, we will never know. I must also say that there is no real detailed explanation about how to work with this book that is a text book after all. It is true each student has to develop his own method . But a standard sample of a method, at least for those who don't know how to do it, would be a good prompter and a useful alpenstock on the way up this mountain. Finally it is quite obvious a student will not be able to improve his "reading skill" if he does not have the recording of the texts. This is real problem: a CD would have made this book a ten times better tool for any student even those who have some Pali phonetics in their ears. But even so the book is quite a good and needed help.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne.

This is a great textbook to learn Pali with. All of the grammar explanations are concise and yet clear. The reading sections are long enough to enjoy, and follow the grammar and vocabulary of the lessons very well. There is plenty of vocabulary introduced in each lesson. There's a lot packed into this small book.
As far as the one reviewer's complaint with missing words, I've yet to find a word that isn't in the vocabularies or glossary.

I think this is an very needed addition to Pali studies. This book will give you a great start in this important language of Buddhism.

Good idea, lots of content and information but heavily flawed. To add to the complexity of learning a new, dead language, the authors add a glossary organized not in the order of the English alphabet, but in the Pali order. Why not waste time looking up words? Good idea! They also fail to provide meanings for many of the words introduced in each lesson, so buy a dictionary, as many are also not in the glossary. Actual translations of the texts, if they couldn't provide the meanings of the words, would have been nice, but this is also missing. I suspect they didn't let someone who doesn't know Pali try this one out or else it is targeted for a classroom situation.