How a sitting works

The books

Sanskrit and the line are one sitting. A case ending does the work an English word would do. In the Yoga Sūtra (योगसूत्र), 1.12, abhyāsa-vairāgyābhyām (अभ्यासवैराग्याभ्याम्) means by practice and by dispassion, and -ābhyām (आभ्याम्) is the word "by."

One sitting

  1. Read the Devanagari aloud, slowly, three times.
  2. Read the transliteration. It is the same line, still joined.
  3. Undo the joins. Hyphens in the lessons are teaching marks. They are not in the manuscript.
  4. Take each word: the form, the grammar, the sense. Do this before the English of the whole line.
  5. Gather the words into the phrases.
  6. Say the line in one sentence of your own. Then read the lesson's sentence and see what you dropped.
  7. Keep the one Sanskrit fact the line needed.
  8. Cover the English and read the Devanagari again. A word that goes blank is the review.

Before a new line, recite the previous line and gloss its heaviest words from memory.

What the grammar column means

Nominative is the form that says what something is, or who does the action. Two nominatives, and no verb, are how a sūtra says "A is B."

A stem inside a compound has no ending of its own. Only the last member of a compound wears the case. Read a compound from the end.

Accusative is the object. Instrumental is "by means of." Dative is "for." Ablative is "from." Genitive is "of." Locative is "in" or "on."

An indeclinable does not take those endings. atha (अथ), tu (तु), ca (च), and iti (इति) are indeclinables.

Anuvṛtti (अनुवृत्ति) means a word from an earlier line is still in force. Sūtras omit it. The sitting names it.

Sound

Devanagari is what you read aloud. The Latin letters sit beside it so an ending can be pointed at. A consonant sign with no extra mark already says consonant plus short a. The stroke under a consonant cancels that a. ः is a soft breath after the vowel. ं is a nasal. ऽ marks an a that was dropped.

The same marks are set out, for a reader who already knows Devanagari from Nepali, in the Sanskrit introduction. This book does not teach the script again.