Pause

Summary

I attended the online classes that started in March or so last year until about mid-June. We learnt a lot of the basics, and our teacher was phenomenal. For instance, there was an entire evening we spent reviewing forty different verbs for the basic tenses. After having learnt a few more tenses, I believe such an activity today will really make my samskritam much better. But wishful thinking aside, I think I am on steady footing right now because though I skipped over the last few weeks in the online course, I joined a year long online course that is part of a certification program. Officially, I am part of the s2s program by Samkrita Bharati. The classes started in September of last year, and we have made significant progress, IMO. I am a big fan of the focus on listening and speaking, and I think we are imbibing the language as we should. At the same time, there is still new concepts and lots of grammar. I will hopefully continue on this journey even in the coming years. Just a couple of weeks back, I had a full fledged conversation as if I am at a grocery store in samskritam, and I was very impressed by myself. Baby steps, but it’s an exciting journey!

Projected Plans

As I continue the course, I will try to post updates more regularly, if time permits. The objective of the blog was to make sure that my journey is clearly documented, and big gaps in these posts don’t necessarily track every bit of the journey. But as I am telling myself these days, better to have these one-off updates than having no website at all!

So my plans forward are clear, focus on the s2s classes, with an upcoming exam, I also need to prepare for that. Meanwhile, I want to increase my exposure to samskritam wherever possible. The new curriculum for Class 6 NCERT has made the Class 6 Sanskrit textbook extremely fun and engaging, so I would love to work through that. I am also excited to work through the standard first level workbook called अभ्यासपुस्तकम् that is published by Samskrita Bharati because I recently discovered that we have covered all topics in it. I found that there are recitations of पञ्चतन्त्रम् on YouTube, which will be exciting to listen to. There are also some nice playlists on YouTube with many stories, which in my opinion can be repeated until they become natural. For instance: BookBox, Gurukula, Madras Sanskrit College and those by Sanskrit Learners Club.