Customer Reviews

Pali - Buddha's Language: A complete teach yourself course for beginners in 10 simple lessons

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This was my first introduction to Pali. It's a great way to get you started and here is why: First of all, it is pretty concise - while there are other tomes with endless detail on grammatical stuff, this book is short and to the point. It gives you a great overview over the most important and essential grammatical ideas to get you going. This helps your motivation as you are basically able to get a pretty good grasp of Pali in just ten lessons. Secondly the book uses actual words of the Buddha as teaching material. Thus you are not working on "artificially constructed" sentences but right from the very first chapter you start delving into the Sutta Pitaka. And finally each chapter lays the foundation (in vocabulary and grammar) for the next - so you are gradually increasing your skills. By the time you are reading the tenth lesson you basically covered all Pali grammar and are just reading an original text from the Samyutta Nikaya with the help of a dictionary. After having said all this, you will probably have to continue with other grammar books later on to cover some of the concepts featured in this book in more detail. Oh, and one other nice feature: The publisher set up a website for their audience where you can listen to the lessons and download audio files - for free.

This great little book is an excellent way to start a study of Pali. The text book itself is a translation of a German textbook by Kurt Schmidt, a well regarded Pali to German translator.

A BIG PLUS is an associated website [...] with sound files of the sections of Pali text in the lessons. The form of this course has similarities to Rune Johansson's excellent classic 'Pali Buddhist Texts'- but that book will cost you $50 to $60 and not have sound files. Another strength is the encouragement to memorise the short blocks of Pali text; which start with verses. This is a good way to go to help get Pali under your skin, and goes a little way to make up for the disadvantage of Pali being a largely textual language, which makes the 'immersion' in spoken language often used in learning languages a little difficult!

Even if you only do a few lessons it will break the spell of the unfamiliar and lead to you being able to pronounce Pali a little better and not glazing over when you see a Pali word.

Every human skill from gardening to music to driving a car has some specialised 'technical' language, it's unavoidable. Even with the best translations in the world there is still a place for knowing a little Pali if you are engaged in the human adventure of learning to Wake Up as recommended by the Buddha. This book can help open a whole new world of understanding Buddha Vacana - the Word of The Buddha.
Cheers
John from Australia

This book is a good start but it's obvious there was no editing done and the author is not a writer. Many grammatical errors in English and misspellings in Pali. The vocabulary is not complete and explanations are sparse. It's seems like he tried to get it done too fast or English is not his native tongue, either way it needed to be edited. Had more time been put into the compiling of this book, it would actually be a good single beginning, however I have chosen not to use this as my main entry to Pali and find A New Course in Reading Pali to be much more in-depth and informative.

This book is fine for a supplemental reference. A Pali Primer is also very well written and introduces the grammar at a controlled pace, it does not jump right into the Suttas but teaches the basic grammar breakdown through simple sentences.