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how do i learn sanskrit?

I could be mean and tell you that a quick google would have told you that there is in fact an entire website for this http://www.learnsanskrit.org/ but I myself am also a linguist, and so I appreciate people trying to broaden their horizons... this thread is now a spoken language learning and discussion thread

>>3896 I'm sorry you're right. I'll delete the thread.

Is Sanskrit or Japanese more difficult for native English (if that even matters)

>>3896 do you know anything about sanskrit specifically ? what are you studying? thinking of using this https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Sanskrit-Part-Thomas-Egenes/dp/8120811402/ref=redir_mobile_desktop?_encoding=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0 in conjunction if I can find a pdf

>>3898 sanskrit by a wide margin

>>3906 Nah it's jap

>>3906 >>3909 Nice arguments you've got there my friends. >>3898 I know nothing about Sanskrit, but I find Japanese to be rather easy to learn. (I'm not a native English speaker but a French one ; that said I doubt that it would make much difference.) Rather than difficult, it's time consuming ; but Anki makes it only a matter of time before you learn the vocabulary. Meanwhile, the grammar is rather free form and minimal, so it's trivial to learn enough to read simple texts and communicate during your travels. And, most important for me since it's my big issue with English, the pronunciation is incredibly simple, so you can actually understand people talking and be understood as a beginner. After ten years, I still struggle to understand English movies without subtitles, while I started watching anime unsub'ed after less than two years of light studies. >>3896 Tell us what your typical day is like, I'm curious. I know what a searcher in a "hard-science" does, but I have no idea what it's like in the more literary circles. Also how realist would you say Arrival was, on the linguistic side ?

>>3910 >>3910 I despise anki also anon linguistics is a pretty hard science thing

why do you learn sanskrit?

>>3914 I feel it'd be nice

>>3898 Hard to tell not knowing either, but in my experience with indo-europeans (latin and german) and sino-tibetans (chinese and minimal jap) I venture say that sanskrit is probably way harder. Japanese would be harder lexically, for it has by far many more characters than sanskrit, being the scripts mostly logographic (ideograms, aka kanji), while sanskrit is phonetical (just like english and most other languages we know today). Means you have to learn a few thousands of characters. Even worse, not only do they not convey the pronunciation, they too have different pronunciations each, depending on context. The soundset of japanese syllables is very simple and limited though, which makes pronouncing it easier. With sanskrit you have to learn what bilabials, retroflex, palatals, and so on are, since it has a really wide array of primitive sounds and transformations thereof. Sanskrit, on the other hand, is one of the eldest languages in the Indo-European family, and the most complex one I've found at that, with about 11 different declinations, it is a highly inflective language. Compare to german which has 4 declinations, and most modern languages transparently encode declinations by the use of propositions, making them, well, prepositional rather than inflective. A highly inflective language is Latin, and it *is* sometimes hard to convey a thought in latin because you have to take care of using the proper inflections. Latin too has different conjugations that don't exist in english and vice-versa, and it's a "modern" language compared to Sanskrit. However the fact that sanskrit is a (far) relative of european languages may make it easier to compose a sentence than in japanese, a language with alien grammatical structures. But that's unlikely, unless you learn some basic Latin and German which, being closer relatives can prepare you for the heavy lifting of sanskrit. It is much easier for me to compose in german and latin than it is in chinese, and since chinese has no common roots with my first two languages, it's words come off as really fuarrrking weird.

>>3918 Addendum. By the way, Japanese grammar is actually much simpler than that of sanskrit, since it merely uses particles to convey meaning, they're like prepositions that you append rather than prepend, but that's probably a huge (and inaccurate) oversimplification

>>3918 >>3919 not op but i wish i could learn japanese but alot of the purely online resources just dont work for me. i have a hard time learning from a computer screen

>sanskrit >resources >a learnable language pick one

>>3920 AS far as spoken Japanese goes, I have found pimsleur is pretty good, I guess you could probably torrent their audio, but I bought a few of their CDs when they had a sale. The program is based on systematic phrase usage, where you learn a phrase, build off of it, and then repeat it in a different context) more or less. I wish that it also supported written language, because I have tried Rosetta stone (free from my job) with little success, and I have tried those "learn it yourself" programs that also seemed to not work well. I speak english, german, spanish, and some french, but i want to learn japenese to conduct business and travel, even though I would be happy with just speaking it, I would really like to learn to read/write it, even though I figure that that part will come easy If i could just speak it.

>>3937 >I would really like to learn to read/write it, even though I figure that that part will come easy If i could just speak it. Japanese children know how to speak japanese, and it still takes them over 10 years to learn the 2000 kanji. But to be honest, you can get around with much less than that, and if you focus your free time on it, it is possible to learn them 2000 in under a year. Now for my own little input : I found the 2k/6k kanji deck recommended by /djt/ to be very good. (Link on this page https://djtguide.neocities.org/anki.html) Rather than learning kanji individually, you learn words with typically two kanji in them, and the different words using a given kanji are grouped within the deck. This way it becomes naturally obvious what the on reading of this kanji is. >>3911 May I ask why you despise Anki ? That's the first time I heard such an opinion I think. And I don't really disagree on linguistic being harder than many other fields, I just know nothing about the processes it follow.

>>3941 Anki doesn't work for me, none of that djt stuff. I just can't learn that way

>you will never learn a foriegn language >you will never lean japanese >you will never lean german >you will never lean Indonesian

>>3960 nigga you know engrish, german isn't all that bad https://www.memrise.com/courses/english/german-2/

>>3963 Teach me sanskrit

>>3964 https://www.memrise.com/course/161814/sanskrit-for-beginners/ have a free education

>>3966 how the fuarrrk do you peopel do that you guys are geniuses

>>3968 >how the fuarrrk do you peopel do that willpower young grasshopper. make a commitment to learn it and eventually you will get good at it. it takes A LOT of time, but if you see it as a worthy cause, you will make time to do it

>>3979 Honestly I've been on lainchan forever and I still feel like I'm not even as good as the average lain

Ancient Greek, French, German, or Latin? I have an academic interest in all,I know English and Spanish already.

>>4234 diqce linguam latinam, mi amice, et poterimus eam loquere

>>4296 Lingua latina est bene facile si linguam hispanicam iam scis.

>>4299 I understand the gist of what you say despite not knowing it at all. Maybe I should get some Latin education