Hello! Welcome to my first Sanskrit post. I’m so excited to learn about this fascinating South Asian language!

To begin with, here is what I already know: Sanskrit dates back over 3,000 years as part of the Indo-European language family and, thanks to its religious and ceremonial use in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, it is still widely used, read, and spoken today. However, it is considered a dead language, since it isn’t the primary spoken language of any group of people.

Throughout this month (February 2025), I will be watching various YouTube lessons on beginner’s Sanskrit. I’ve already started by watching a very easy-to-follow lesson on Sanskrit vowels from ChinfoChannel, which I will link here:

The rest of the lessons in this series are available for an enrollment fee on ChinfoChannel’s website, which they link to in the description box of their video. I would say this teacher and lesson format is worth the price, though I can’t afford it myself at this time. In this free lesson of just over an hour, the teacher takes us through how to recognize, write, and pronounce each Sanskrit vowel and provides examples of words that start with them, and I found this format extremely effective in committing the vowels to my memory. He also explains that Sanskrit is a language that uses sounds from each place of articulation – guttural, palatal, cerebral, dental, and labial – which makes mastery of Sanskrit a great help in learning to speak other languages. He also talks about “the Sanskrit effect,” a term first used by neuroscientist James Hartzell to describe the neurological benefits to learning Sanskrit and memorizing Sanskrit mantras, which I found very interesting. He also gives some background on why certain words mean what they mean, and how important it is to understand the “duty-based society” that the language represents. It’s a great lesson!

I will also be checking out videos from The Sanskrit Channel and ChinfoChannel’s Sanskrit for Shastra Study playlist. I’ll talk about those more in a couple of weeks if I enjoy them.

Of course, as with any of these month-long language projects, I don’t expect to achieve mastery of Sanskrit in such a short time, but it’s fun to get the basics of how a language works as I read its literature in English translation. I hope you will join me in perusing these lessons and/or reading the Rig Veda, which I plan to post about next Friday.

Happy reading and learning!