Product Description

Just reprinted, excellent ed. used widely as a text, useful for beginning students. We also carry pt. 2.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #56944 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 366 pages

Review
"A dictactically well structured and student friendly text." Prof. Van Haven, The Netherlands

Language Notes
Text: English

Customer Reviews

Start here!
If you're interested in the Sanskrit language, whether for linguistic or philosophical reasons, this is the book you should start with.

It introduces the script and the grammar in slow, gentle steps. After about 7 lessons, you ease into the different kinds of external sandhi (sound changes and assimilations from one word to another). By the end of the first volume, you've learned a suprising amount: most of the major declensions, and been introduced to the verb, and the principles of compound formation.
Every lesson has plenty of exercises, both English to Sanskrit and vice versa, to test your comprehension and to give you practice. The answers to the exercises are given in the back of the book.

Just a great, great introduction to the language. After finishing Book I, you can continue with his Book II, or pick up, with confidence, any of the standard academic introductions - Maurer, Goldman and Sutherland, Deshpande, even (gasp!) Coulson.

I wish every ancient language had an introductory book like this.

Excellent Sanskrit Pre-Primer
Egenes' book is excellent as a pre-primer. It presents enough information in its 18 lessons to give the beginning Sanskritist a firm foundation for progressing to a more difficult Sanskrit primer.

Covered are the basic uses of Classical Sanskrit's 8 cases; paradigms for 9 nominal declensions; a small list of verbs showing present, imperfect, future, and gerund forms; tables for external sandhi, and coverage of two internal sandhi rules.

The introduction to the Devanagari script is excellent. It goes beyond other primers and shows you how to actually write the characters. Plus, the text is large and very easy to read.

It is well-worth the price.

Best choice
I think I have looked at most of the available Sanskrit introductory books - Coulson, Goldberg, Apte, Rapid sanskrit method, etc, first as a student and now as a teacher. Egenes is the best that I have seen. It is clear, simple, well thought out. It uses English grammatical terms. The exercises are good, and the answers are at the back if you need them. The devanagari is big and clear.

My only reservations are that in the earlier edition, Egenes uses the nom. masc. singular ending -s, then has to explain it away a few chapters later.

If you are learning or teaching Sanskrit, this is definietly the best choice.