The Teaching (and learning?) of Sanskrit

[Sahmilat]

I made an academic library run yesterday and spent a lot of time sitting in the Sanskrit section. I was mostly comparing the available textbooks in English and looking for easy readers. I didn't make much progress in these goals, but I did find two books I think are at the least interesting and possibly even valuable for trying to learn Sanskrit.

The first book is The Teaching of Sanskrit (1962) by R. N. Safaya. Of course, this is a book directed towards current and prospective teachers in India in the 60s. I fall into none of these categories. I suspect that few people on this forum do. I am merely attempting to independently learn this language. However, I figure if I learn how to teach Sanskrit, I might learn how to learn it. There are, I think, important lessons to be derived from this book that can be applied to learning not only Sanskrit, but also other classical and even modern languages. Much of this advice will be new to no one here, but I think that the study of classical languages is still often misunderstood, resulting in them being poorly taught and learned. This is, at least, my limited experience as a college student, not as an instructor (yet). I want to provide a short (?) summary of the most salient points in this book that anyone trying to learn Sanskrit should keep in mind.

There are, of course, limitations of this book's usefulness for the self-learner. The most obvious one is that it deals with how to teach Sanskrit to a class, and as such much of the advice depends on there actually being a teacher. Tutors for Sanskrit are, I suspect, hard to find outside of South Asia, so many of us are entirely on our own. Nevertheless, I believe that there are ways to apply these on their own.

The General Principles of Sanskrit Teaching
Safaya puts forward a few principles of teaching Sanskrit. Some of these are obvious, such as that if a child is immersed in Sanskrit from a young age, they will learn it. I think it is too late for us for this "naturalness principle" to be very helpful. However, we can still try to learn something about language acquisition from children. Safaya pulls some important points from understanding of L1 acquisition. Most stressed is the "principle of oral-aural appeal". He argues that listening and speaking should come first before reading and writing. This may seem obvious to those of us that mainly study modern languages (my German class in middle school was primarily based on speaking, with relatively little reading or writing until high school), it goes contrary to the "traditional" wisdom in teaching classical languages. "The only point in learning a dead language is to read, why waste time trying to speak?" My answer is that speaking is fun, but Safaya draws on another scholar and argues that speaking is not a waste of time at all, but actually more efficient: "By using the language as speech the pupil will cover something like twenty times as much ground in a given time as he would by doing written exercises" (Kitson, Theory and Practice of Language Teaching). The structures we imitate in spoken language are assimilated quicker, the words we learn retained longer, and the process of learning is altogether more pleasant, Safaya argues. I'm no linguist, and I don't know how the current research supports or denies these claims. It is only by drawing on my experience and what I hope is my common sense that I tend to agree. Even with ancient languages, if you want real mastery over the language, you must listen and speak, the earlier the better.
How can we apply this for the self learner? This is obviously much harder to do without a teacher. I follow Deka Glossai in suggesting that the best book for this is Assimil's Le Sanskrit. Even if you have no French, liberal use of Google Translate should help you get a lot out of this book, and the audio is invaluable. By listening and repeating, self-learners can try to approach the nature of a classroom. Another book that I suspect could be helpful for those of us who do not want to deal with Assimil's French is N. D. Krishnamurthy's Conversational Sanskrit (confusingly subtitled A Microwave Approach?). This is the other book that I found at the library. Its most obvious drawbacks are that it has no audio and the romanization scheme is nonstandard. From my brief perusal of the book I think it can still be useful for reading aloud and learning words and full sentences rather than starting from grammar rules. More discussion on the place of grammar later.

The Syllabus in Sanskrit
This was, I think, one of the most important sections of the book. It is simply a model curriculum for the first six years of Sanskrit study. I considered copy-pasting my entire recreation of the table in this post, but I felt that would be going too far. If you want the full table, feel free to PM me and I'll figure out how to get it to you. In this post, I'll try to summarize the most important points of structure.
First, the curriculum has seven parts. In the order they are to be done: Oral work, text, vocabulary, grammar, translation, composition, and extensive reading, the last of which only is used in the middle and higher levels. In the second half of the curriculum, specific oral work and vocabulary are left behind, not because they are not useful, but because oral work will be done through discussion of longer texts and vocabulary will of course be learned from the same. I will mainly focus on the early stages, as these are more pertinent to me and to people trying to get a start on Sanskrit on their own.

Oral Work
The importance of oral work has already been explained. The aims are to develop correct pronunciation, to be able to form simple sentences and questions, to practice elementary grammatical forms, and to be able to conduct simple conversations. In a classroom, the teacher would speak new words and the student would repeat. We have to settle for Assimil, which gives us just about the same thing, but without the corrections a teacher can provide. Safaya gives this order for oral exercises: Framing simple sentences; Question and Answer; Action-Chains (like describing your morning routine); Conversation; Simple Description (e.g. of pictures); Storytelling and Narration; Lecture and Debate; Recitation of Verses; Dramatization. The first three, as well as simple description and storytelling, are pretty easily adapted to self-learning. You just have to make both the question and the answer. For conversation, dialogues can be imitated, such as from Assmil, or created on your own. Talking to yourself seems silly sometimes, but I think self-talk and reading aloud is one of the best ways to internalize structure and vocabulary.

Text
Safaya regards textbooks as the indispensable core of the curriculum, but warns that you should not overly rely on them. He distinguishes five types of textbooks: Intensive reading, extensive reading, grammar, translation, and workbooks. Unfortunately, only grammar and translation books seem readily available for the beginner in an English base. The available good readers only seem suitable for intermediate and up. Safaya includes a long list of them, most of which seemed to be based in a modern Indian language. I will append my own list of readers in modern European languages, expecting it to be more widely useful*.
The ideal textbook is described, but unfortunately I doubt that such a book yet exists. It should provide relatively short, varied readings, both on ancient and modern themes. The language should be graded, introducing a base of common words, words belonging to the school environment, essential particles, and numerals. The grammar should be a shallow grade, with no sandhi, compounds, or dual at first (I have seen textbooks delay sandhi but never the dual). Grammatical forms should be introduced based on their frequency, not just to fill out a paradigm. There should be a variety of exercises: Definition, undoing compounds/sandhi, explaining grammatical forms, giving synonyms, rewriting sentences, translating back and forth, filling in the blank, explaining idioms, writing a Sanskrit commentary, etc.

Vocab
Only a few new words should be introduced each lesson, more in the second and third grades. Starting with the second grade, word-building and derivation should be explored. I have found that most English-base textbooks try to introduce far too many words in one lesson. A notable exception is Egenes.

Grammar
This is probably the biggest area that modern textbooks fail in. Safaya discusses the arguments of advocates and critics of grammar teaching, and adopts a middle ground: some grammar should be taught, but exceptions and uncommon forms should be put off as much as possible. Grammar must come only after some understanding of the language from oral work. Very little time should be used teaching technical terms, and the focus should be on applied grammar and not theoretical. Western textbooks in the philological tradition flunk this pretty hard. Safaya lambastes the "traditional method" that focuses on definitions, rules, and paradigms, saying that it is backwards from the way we think, because it starts with the abstract and moves to the concrete, and tends to introduce far more than is necessary for a solid base in the language. He suggests that the grammar curriculum should be structured in the following way. Beginners should use the "informal method" of learning grammar through oral usage, rather than formal rules. He also calls this the "natural method", and this focus on usage examples rather than rules certainly appears in LLPSI and other textbooks in that tradition. After the beginner levels, grammar should be taught using the "inductive-deductive method", in which a set of examples is given and the students try to form a generalization based on these. By discovering the rules themselves, the students will remember them better. It is only at the highest stages that a systematic knowledge of grammar from the "traditional" method necessary, and Safaya suggests that study of Paninian sutras is the key to this.
How can we do this as self-learners with inadequate textbooks and no teachers? Books like Assimil and Conversational Sanskrit seem to help us to start out with the informal method to some degree, but there are simply a lack of easy texts for beginners to read, as far as I am aware. If I get no other response to this post, I would be happy to be corrected on this point alone and pointed in the right direction. However, I think that the arguments Safaya makes regarding traditional grammar study are sound. A systematic knowledge of the language is great to have, but that should come after understanding from usage.

Overall Lessons and TL;DR
Sanskrit is just like any other language, and should be taught both aurally and visually. The focus of learning should be the text, and not the grammatical rule. Unfortunately, the western tradition of Sanskrit teaching is very much stuck in the Grammar-Translation mindset, and there are almost no textbooks that provide adequate reading or opportunity for oral practice. If I can draw a conclusion for self-learners from this book, it is that we desperately need a new, graded, reading and speaking based textbook. If you can't wait for someone to write that, your best bet is Assimil (especially taking advantage of the audio!) before moving on to one of the readers listed below, and only after developing a solid reading skill should you try to understand the entire structure of the language in all its intricate details.

If anyone has resources, suggestions, or arguments against the book's position as I have presented it, please share them.

* A long list of readers
English:
A Sanskrit Reader (Lanman)
Intermediate Sanskrit Selections
Brough, J., Selections from Classical Sanskrit Literature
Warder, A. K., Sanskrit prose reader
Mahalinga Sastri, Y., A First Reader of Sanskrit
Banerji, H.C, The New Method Sanskrit reader
Scharf, Peter, Ramopakhyana
The Clay Sanskrit Library
German:
Sanskrit-Chrestomathie
Mylius, K., Chrestomathie der Sanskritliteratur
Sanskrit-Lesebuch
French:
Manuel pour étudier la langue sanscrite

[Ezra]

Having Lingua Sanscrita Per Se Illustrata in addition to Assimil's course would be great.