Half-yearly update!

Summary

I do have a few updates, but progress has relatively slowed down. In an unfortunate turn of events, I had to miss a lot of my Gita Sopanam 1 & 2 classes, but I kept up with most of समासवर्गः. I attended two camps already: गङ्गोत्री and धीमहि, both in Chicago. The organizing elements continues on track, with odd oppotunities to set up events, MC, and do some write-ups. The involvement also ensures that I continue to listen to संसृतसम्भाषणम् often, which helps with acquiring the language and passive learning. Teaching has been ongoing, and has helped a lot with speaking. I have also plans to take up DLP exams moving forward. More details on these follow.

Progress in classes

I miss taking the time to work through exercises in Gita Sopanam 1 and Gita Sopanam 2. I used to be pretty regular with these before, but things have slowed down a lot since February. In a nutshell, the reason is that I have decided to free-up my Sunday mornings a bit for my teaching, and I also find that I am able to pick-up the lessons through self-study and don’t find the classes to be interesting enough. I am certain that there is still a lot for me to learn, and I certainly need to memorize and get more thorough with forms. I am just taking things slow, and I hope that my progress with other channels will keep me afloat for a while. समासवर्गः is interesting, but it has become a bit infrequent. I do like taking the time to attempt parsing through श्लोकाः, so I am hoping that by putting in some more effort, I will get better at it (and also become faster with it).

Teaching

I had to miss a few classes due to travel and other committments, but I am proud of my students for showing up whenever there is class. It seems to me that they are genuinely interested. I am also getting better at speaking with confidence, and we have worked our way through almost 40% of अभ्यासपुस्तकम्. My goal is to complete most of it by the end of the calendar year, and move to more immersive learning and lots of practice next year before switching into अभ्यासदर्शिनी (which I skipped myself).

Camps

I took my entire family to गङ्गोत्री this year, and it was extremely delightful. There is just something about गङ्गोत्री classes that makes it the perfect level of revision and new things (a lot has to do with class size and teacher!). My experience with the रूपकम् practice was exactly as I envisioned an upper class रूपकम् to be, and I am all for it. I also got to see some of my students (my family) learn from other teachers and outshine their peers, which gives me immense satisfaction! I hope we get to experience more such camps together in some form.

I also co-organized and participated enthusiastically in धीमहि this year. I met many people who I had only seen on Zoom previously, and I made some strong connections for the future, and I know where to look if I must tap into some inspiration. I am so proud of my peers, most of who know so much more than I do and are interested in so similar things as me when it comes to using my संस्कृतम् moving forward.

Distance Learning Program

One of the first approaches I knew of for picking up संस्कृतम् was DLP and the four exams: प्रवेशः, परिचयः, शिक्षा, कोविदः. Sometime in February, someone told me that I am suited for DLP exams, and I agreed. I tried to source the books from India, but that didn’t work (and led to a happy accident of my mom joining DLP classes). I therefore decided to commit and bought all four books from पदम् in Aldie, VA, and my friend helped with transportation. In summary, I have the books now and I plan to registere for प्रवेशः exam provided I am able to get through most of the book before the deadline for registration.

Future Projects

1. I want to create a प्रवेशः database of questions and answers not just for exam preparation but also for generating study materials in general. I tried some OCR and scanning to start with (and there are some results to show), but I am not satisfied with these yet.
2. I want to gather tacit संस्कृतम् learning and my scattered notes into one single confluence, preferably on the web. It takes time, but I think it’s a worthwhile effort.
3. My long term vision/hope is that there will be a Duolingo/Airlearn equivalent for bite-sized lessons for संस्कृतम् in the future.
4. I created a couple of vibhakti training web tools for me to learn more about identification of forms in the wild, but they aren’t well-documented and they can certianly use some sprucing up. I need to iron out some details and soft-launch it.

Resources

During धीमहि, we learnt about building संस्कृतम् games, and I some of my peers have already launched a few of these. I want to explore them more in the days to come.