Customer Reviews

Students English Sanskrit Dictionary

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Apte's dictionary is one of the handiest sanskrit lexicon's around. While nothing can beat Monier-Williams' for thoroughness, Apte's brief entries are highly usable. He has restricted himself to listing only the more frequent uses of words and roots. most entries do list multiple definitions, as well as examples of usage culled from Sanskrit literature. This is a good portable dictionary. It served me quite well for the first two years of Sanskrit study. As with all books published in India, there are occassional pages where it is difficult to read the print--don't complain, this is part of the Sanskrit experience. It is good preparation for reading manuscripts.

Its a nice dictionary. If you have an english text that you want to translate to Sanskrit - this book might be a very valuable resource for that.

HOWEVER, keep in mind that this is 'English - Sanskrit' dictionary. It has words in English, and definitions/same meaning words in Sanskrit. Maybe, what you are looking for is a 'Sanskrit - English' dictionary. The same author also has that dictionary and I'm sure it's good.

Since my memory is not so brilliant these days, I wanted this book principally to look up those spiritual terms which I knew I had encountered but could not remember. Having used it now a number of times, I reckon the success rate is probably around 80%. The failures may, however, be my own fault! The book is clearly aimed at students studying the language and contains such distinctly unspiritual words as 'telephone' and 'electric'. This means that there are very many words that are not relevant to my purpose and whose presence is likely to create a 'wood for trees' effect. Also, the quality of printing is not always perfect. Apart from that, it serves the purpose well!

Dennis Waite, author of Back to the Truth: 5000 years of Advaita

The printing and type are very poor.

Difficult to read.

Some words are illegible beause of bad printing.

Buyer beware! My copy of this book is totally unreadable because the OCR software does not recognize Sanskrit and thus the "Sanskrit" parts are like: "frqqq-/?: qvrrrtt AR//-# sftqv+". The whole book consists of such meaningless codes and so I have to return it. Since I am not living in the US, the postage I paid is several times higher than the amount Amazon said they will pay me back.

Jeff Ho