गोोद् मोर्निन्ग् !
Why did I try learning the Devanagari script?
There are many reasons. For pāḷi learners, one of the benefits of knowing Devanagari script is that we can use additional Sanskrit - English dictionaries to look up a pāḷi word to dig more information about it or simply make an attempt to find its definitions that we simply can not find in pāḷi dictionaries.
Tip: Very often, a pāḷi word you found in pāḷi text is in its conjugation or declension form, or sometimes a complex or combined word (samāsa, sandhi,…). If it is so, you may not find it in any common pāḷi dictionaries.
Before checking dictionaries, we need to “return” it to its “stem” or basic form or split them up into smaller words.
To be simple, you can think of it something like “happiness” or “big-hearted”, the dictionary does have “happy” or “big” or “heart” only, you need to know yourself “happiness” is from “happy”, and do look up “happy” and alike.
For example: with these words dhammā, mahāpañño, we may have to use dhamma, mahā, pañña to look up instead (if your dictionary doesn’t have them). In a practical context, it is not this simple.
To be able to do this we need to learn a little bit of basic pāḷi grammar or make a good guess for simple words.
For more complex words, you may try to find its definitions in aṭṭhakathā or ṭīkā. Although you may not understand the explanations there completely, you will have chances to see its split up forms or get some clues from there.
If you can read Myanmar, you can also try using the nissaya apps. See this post for download links.
Sometimes, although one does know all of the vocabularies and grammar points in a particular sentence, still one does not have enough confidence whether one understands its meanings correctly and fully.
So one of the best ways to learn pāḷi is to learn Myanmar or Sinhalese first if you want to get many tools and supporting resources for your learning path.
You can test this by finding a few compound pāḷi words in Pāḷi - Myanmar and Pāḷi - English dictionaries, you will see the differences.
The traditional sequence
Now, go back to learning the Devanagari script.
There are a few ways to start learning the Devanagari script. I learn the letters in their traditional order (like pāḷi), beginning with vowels then consonants, from ka-vagga, then ca-vagga and so on. Since many Devanagari letters have subtle distinctions, it is good to group them by similarity and study their nuance differences.
Full disclaimer:
I am not a serious Devanagari learner or pāḷi scholar. At the time of this writing, I can not write complex Devanagari words with paper and pen, but with a digital keyboard, I could do it easily. Smart Devanagari keyboards will handle all of the ligatures (two or more letters combined into one) for us. For working with Sanskrit - English dictionaries, it is good enough.
From my experience, if I don’t use these letters for a few months, I tend to forget, more or less, most of them. However, I just needed to review them again for a short time, one evening or alike, then the all letters come back happily.
I mainly use free resources and apps on the Internet to learn things. Here are some that I have tried on my Android phone. They are all free to download.
1. Learning and writing basic letters
Hindi Alphabet Writing
http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.writing.learn.hindi
Write Hindi
http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.tbng.writehindi
These two apps both support writing on your touch screen devices. The Hindi Alphabet Writing app is also packaged with audio.
2. Devanagari keyboards
I have been using Multiling O Keyboard to write pāḷi on Android-powered devices for quite a long time. No doubt, it is a sort of superpower keyboard.
Multiling O Keyboard App
http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kl.ime.oh
To get an additional Devanagari/Sanskrit keyboard, simply install its Sanskrit plugin:
Multiling O Keyboard Sanskrit plugin
http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=klye.plugin.sa
Here is its pāḷi plugin:
Multiling O Keyboard Pāḷi plugin
http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=klye.plugin.pi1
Multiling O Keyboard also supports so many other languages, including Sinhalese, Myanmar, even Math symbols keyboard… All you need to do is to install additional language plugins.
The plugin will enable the auto-suggestion function for your particular language. Without such plugins, you still can use the keyboard, but there is no auto-suggestion feature when typing.
You can easily customise the Multiling O Keyboard layout and add very handy commands like select all, copy, paste… to the Suggestion Bar.
You can also use Google keyboard, but it currently doesn’t have an autosuggestion feature for Sanskrit. For popular languages, like English, Gboard has a very smart auto-suggestion and next word suggestion database.
Gboard
http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.inputmethod.latin
3. Reading complex words
In general, it is not so difficult to remember the basic vowels (V) or consonants (C) and basic consonant-vowel (CV) combinations.
However, it is much more complicated to read words with ligatures or complex consonant combinations (CCC and alike).
To get the taste of that a little bit, you can try the Transliteration feature of this Sanskrit Driller app:
Sanskrit Driller
http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sanskritdriller
4. Text transliteration
For simple text transliteration (from Devanagari character to IAST - Roman character), one can use the utility Text Transliterator of the Sanskrit Driller app mentioned above.
To converter lengthy pāḷi documents between Roman and Devanagari script programmatically, one can try using Pāḷi Script Converter from https://tipitaka.app ‐ developed by a Sri Lankan developer Janaka.
The library is in JavaScript (Nodejs library) and is available on its developer’s GitHub repository. It only handles and converts pāḷi in Devanagari and various scripts, it does not fully support all Devanagari characters like ṛ (ऋ) and so on.
5. Monier Williams Sanskrit -> English dictionary
There are many Sanskrit dictionary apps on the Google Play store and Apple App Store. Most of them are Sanskrit - Hindi dictionaries, a few are Sanskrit - English dictionaries.
Here I want to introduce Monier Williams Sanskrit - English dictionary data.
Find the latest download links from this URL:
https://sanskrit.inria.fr/goldendict.html
From that, you can also find Sanskrit - French dictionary, declension and conjugation dictionaries. These data can be used on many platforms: computer (Windows, Linux, Mac,…), eBook reader, Apple iOS or Android-powered devices.
License:
These dictionary resources are usable under the conditions of the Creative Commons license: “Héritage du Sanskrit” by Gérard Huet is released under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Creative Commons license.https://sanskrit.inria.fr/goldendict.html
To use them on Android, I use the ColorDict app.
ColorDict
http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.socialnmobile.colordict
Unzip compressed Sanskrit files downloaded from the above URL, and copy/move them to the dictdata folder of ColorDict.
Note:
- If you don’t see the dictdata folder in your phone storage, simply run ColorDict first, it will automatically create it for you.
- If you are using an old version of ColorDict, you should update it, ColorDict can now support definitions with HTML tags better (Stardict data with sametypesequence=h). At the time of writing this post, the current ColorDict version is 4.4.6.
- If you have other issues, try also updating your
Android System WebView(google.android.webview).
You can also use any other apps that support Stardict dictionary data. However, you should use ones that can render HTML well since these Sanskrit dictionaries are produced using sametypesequence=h.
Below is an example entry of Monier Williams Sanskrit -> English dictionary:
कृतपुण्य [k.rtapu.nya] [k.rtapu.nya_pr] [ kṛtapuṇya ] [ kṛtá-puṇya ] m. f. n. one who has accomplished meritorious acts in a former life, happy Lit. R. Lit. MārkP.
••
Here you can guess the equivalent IAST characters of कृतपुण्य then check again with the word shown in the dictionary kṛtapuṇya. We can see some similarities in meanings of the word katapuñña in pāḷi and कृतपुण्य kṛtapuṇya in Sanskrit.
6. Drilling in more
To remember the basic Devanagari characters it took about 2 days. For complex combinations, I don’t know how long it might take since I didn’t spend time trying for this.
AnkiDroid
http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ichi2.anki
(On Android and computer, it is still free. On iOS, it was about US $25.)
Find shared Anki decks in Devanagari script or pāḷi decks in Devanagari script, then you can practise more.
Conclusion:
So for my simple goal, the above resources are good enough. If you are going to be a serious Devanagari or Sanskrit learner, obviously there are more things you need to do.
This post is submitted here to save my time later, and hopefully your time.
May you all be healthy and happy!
मय् योउ अल्ल् बे हेअल्थ्य् अन्द् हप्प्य् !
PS: The गोोद् मोर्निन्ग् ! you saw at the beginning of this post is “good morning” written in Devanagari script.
And the last one मय् योउ अल्ल् बे हेअल्थ्य् अन्द् हप्प्य् is for you, to guess.
No dictionary can understand these alien words correctly, try yourself.