Some here may be interested in this:
The early lessons seem very well done.
Hello all,
I’m one of the people working on this project and asked Joel to share a link here in case it may be of interest to the forum.
One of the inspirations for this project was Hans Ørberg’s Lingua Latina series, and in fact an early prototype of our project was heavily based on Ørberg’s first chapter. But during testing, we realized a few problems with our approach, both for Sanskrit specifically and for second languages in general:
- Vocabulary load, especially for those who don’t already know a related language or who are not highly determined. Lingua Latina mitigates this problem because so many Latin words are familiar through cognates, but even so, the ramp-up rate can be intimidatingly high for some. Language novices, especially, tend to lean heavily on lexical information for comprehension, as opposed to parsing and understanding the various inflectional endings. So if the lexical load is high, comprehension suffers.
- The lack of narrative choice. The stories about Marcus and Quintus may appeal to some, but if the core story is boring to the reader, it’s hard to see how Lingua Latina could be effective. On the same note, if later chapters are too difficult, the only real path forward is to reread past material, which is less interesting.
- The insistence on using only the target language (in our case, Sanskrit). This is acceptable if comprehension is very high, but if comprehension fails, comprehension suffers and there is no easy recourse for the reader.
- The adherence to a specific grammatical syllabus, which gives some stories a more didactic feel (e.g. the subjunctive story, the pluperfect story, …) and might make the text feel artificial.
Our approach is to build a library of simple stories written in natural Sanskrit, with the vital restriction of limiting the vocabulary size as much as possible. All sentences in our library have per-word and per-sentence translations to assist comprehension. Although still limited, we also have an integrated grammar guide to clarify specific rules for those interested.
Aspects of this approach were developed through wonderful conversations with some members of the living Latin community, and for those unfamiliar, we can recommend this talk by Justin Slocum Bailey, this paper by Robert Patrick, or this summary post by Lance Piantaggini.
Our project is still in the very early phases, but there is enough stable material that we thought the project might be worth sharing out. I’m also happy to answer any questions you all might have. And if you would like to help beta test, please let us know. We’d be happy to write something just for you.
The grammar that they link to does not give any inflection whatsoever, only a few derivations, and outright states “[s]tudying grammar is not necessary for acquiring Sanskrit, and we encourage you to focus on reading or listening to Sanskrit instead”, which for a language as inflected as Sanskrit worries me.
But I hope these are growing pains
It is possible to pick up these elements through exposure rather than explanation. Languages would be rather tough for kids to learn if it wasn’t so.
Hi amarahasa, this looks great, thank you! I just tested it, and it’s easy enough to read the story saṃjayo na sukhī, even for someone who hasn’t looked at Sanskrit before. Is there any plan to add audio? Many thanks.
Cheers, Chad
Maybe so, but children have the advantage of continuous immersion in a living language community surrounded by adults who will correct their mistakes and who will have absolute fluency; children’s brains are also hardwired into acquiring language like this, whereas adults have somewhat different acquisition patterns.
Though I assume there are also groups using living Sanskrit as there are for Ancient Greek and Latin…
Thanks for the comments so far.
We’re still unsure how to strike the balance here. The pedagogical value of an inflection table is that it lets you see all the forms for a given pattern at a glance and perhaps see larger patterns that can aid you in memorization or drilling. Many of us who have studied classical languages can probably recite certain paradigms by heart.
At the same time, paradigm charts are not psychologically “real” in the sense that the mental processes involved when we process an inflectional ending in real time have no relationship to a specific ordering or sequence as you might find in a chart. Anecdotally, when learning Latin there have been endings I could recognize and understand at a glance, but it would take me much longer to describe where they fit in on a chart. Likewise, there have been endings I remembered from a declension table that I stumbled over when encountering them in a real sentence.
In part as a kind of discipline in this early phase of the project, we’ve decided to hold off on delving too deeply into grammar explanations right now. As a kind of compromise position, we’ve decided to present those tables in level-appropriate Sanskrit, though that’s a work in progress. Perhaps some of the flavor of this approach can be conveyed in this early chapter on the consonant system: http://beta.amarahasa.com/books/vyanjanani/
To follow up on your second post, it is certainly the case that an input-rich environment is vital for fluency gains, but some version of this can be provided through programs like extensive reading. Since adult learners already have mastery of one language, they can certainly use this foundation to better understand the target language and avoid having to learn every concept by induction; but when it comes to fluent moment-by-moment understanding of continuous language, the basic principles of acquisition and input seem to hold.
Yes, this is definitely in our plans! We want to make sure the text is more stable first, since producing high-quality audio is expensive.