A twelve week course on Pali for serious students by Bhante Sujato

Yes, I am, Christie. I’m glad you have them useful! One word of caution, of course, these I prepared way back in about 2005 when I was just teaching myself Pāli from those books - so no guarantee I would vouch for those translations now! :grinning:
Ajahn Brahmali has prepared an answer key to Warder, which would be much more authoritative, in my view.

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Thank you so much for considering this Bhante, and I am willing to help out with the logistics of distribution (if a bulk order is feasible).

Maybe once you have sorted out registration, we can do a quick poll to see if anyone is interested and then work out whether it will make sense or not. For example, if there are enough attendees from Sydney, I am happy to pick up the books from Lokanta Vihara (assuming that’s where they get shipped to) and then distribute to others to save on further postage. We’ll have to figure out the best solution for those in other locations.

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Thank you John, I am truly humbled to have a chance to offer my appreciation to the author of such useful resources. I understand the caveat around accuracy.

What I really found useful was that you took the trouble to do the translations twice (for Warder) - a word by word transliteration, followed by a “natural English” translation, and that helped me enormously. Also you took the trouble to research and prove that the sentences from the exercises came from the suttas (where possible).

I am also using Ajahn Brahmali’s answer key (as well as doing the course on wiswo.org), and find it quite useful to compare his answers with yours.

In contrast, I found some of the answers in the “official” key to Pali Primer a bit frustrating. Some of them use words not taught until the next lesson, and some of them I did not understand why certain words were used and not others.

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That’s a really useful approach. In fact, it is something that I’d be delighted to see someone take up on SuttaCentral. Even just for selected suttas, having both word-by-word and idiomatic translations together would be really helpful.

Sure, if you are happy to take that on, that would be great. We could send them to Lokanta, or perhaps the Buddhist Library would be better, I’m sure they’d be happy to help out.

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One “project” that I want to do in the near future to assist in my Pali learning is to take the passages from Rune Johansson’s Pali Buddhist Texts, rewrite them in longhand (pen and paper) - my mind seems to grasp and remember stuff better if I write them out.

And then I’ll try and write out the word transliteration on the next line, followed by my attempt at translation on the line after that. In the same style as John Kelly’s key to Warder - I find that format very conducive to learning.

In the future, this process could be somewhat automated, perhaps in a version of Bilara.

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Created A feature request: Literal translation · Issue #2730 · suttacentral/suttacentral · GitHub

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That’s a really good idea, Christie. And an excellent way to learn! That’s why I did it for the Warder exercises and other things. This is called a tri-linear format. First a line of the Pāli, then a line of literal translation with the words separated by “/”, and finally a more fluent translation. I learnt this approach from a person called Piya Tan from Singapore. Many years ago, I spoke about this learning approach to Bhikkhu Bodhi, and then helped edit his recent book “Reading the Buddha’s Discourses in Pāli” (Wisdom 2020) which does exactly this with dozens of short suttas from the Saṃyutta Nikāya. This book is very highly recommended for anyone learning Pāli, as it includes clear grammatical explanations as well, and introductions to the texts.

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Thank you so much. I’ve given this some thought, and added a comment on the feature request, with a diagram illustrating the sort of information that could be presented as part of a word by word transliteration and grammatical analysis:

https://github.com/suttacentral/suttacentral/issues/2730#issuecomment-1652660543

Thank you for this information, John, very interesting, and thanks for the recommendation to read “Reading the Buddha’s Discourses in Pāli” which I shall certainly try to do.

In thinking through this, and following the way Ajahn Brahmali analyses the Warder exercises, it may be useful to also indicate the grammatical analysis as part of the word-by-word translation like thus:

Warder Lesson 1 first exercise:

tathāgato bhāsati
"thus-gone" (agent m nom sg) / speaks (pres 3rd sg)
The Tathāgata speaks.

Whilst the above seems tedious, pedantic or perhaps self evident, it really comes in useful after Lesson 7 or thereabouts when the sentences become quite hard to parse, and I am not sure whether the sentence is active or passive (which require different cases for agent and patient), and which case is applicable (as there are ambiguities). It becomes even more important when the relative pronoun is not adjacent to the noun but they need to be matched.

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Dear Bhante,

I’m using a free Foxit program to write notes on a PDF file while waiting for a paper copy. But on second thoughts, I wouldn’t write anything on the paper copy as it’s so expensive! :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

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Hi Christie,
My advice is just do what’s helpful to you for learning Pāli. Definitely skip the tedious for parts that are obvious. Doing something that’s too much of a chore will slow down the rest of your learning, is unnecessary, and might even put you off.

You seem like a very detail-oriented person! Like me - I love it!

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Haha - in real life I am apparently a big picture kind of person who tends to skip on the details, but I’ve been stung too many times so I force myself to slow down for these kind of efforts. I agree, that kind of analysis is probably not worth it for the first few lessons, but I’ve been caught in some of the later lessons. By the way, I am currently up to Lesson 11 and hoping to complete all the exercises up to Lesson 12 before the course starts so that I am prepared.

Bhante, Have both acceptance & second-chance messages gone out by now? If we have received neither, does that indicate our form submissions didn’t go through?

And if so, do we still have time to re-submit our answers?

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I didn’t get a message either, and have been starting to worry. I didn’t sign in to Google when I submitted my form, I am hoping that doesn’t become an issue. I don’t like Google and avoid using their services.

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On reflection, I have decided to quote some examples from the Warder exercises to illustrate why it’s important to do a rigorous grammatical analysis. I apologise to those who are more fluent in Pali than me, no doubt these may seem trivial and obvious but I really struggled with this as a beginner (I only started reading Warder after Bhante Sujato announced this class which was a fortnight ago, so this reflects two weeks of study).

Warder Lesson 2 exercise 3 (translate from English):

The god, who is not a human being, approaches the thus-gone.

Ajahn Brahmali gives the translation as thus:

devo amanusso yena tathāgato ten’upasaṃkamati

which after grammatical analysis (separating tena and upasaṃkamati into separate words due to elision following sandhi rules):

devo (agent: nom m sg) amanusso (attribute nom m sg, see Warder pg. 9) yena (indec) tathāgato (“patient”, however nom rather than acc m sg, see Warder pg. 14) ) tena (indec) upasaṃkamati (pres 3rd sg)

What is frustrating is that the yena … tena construction is not fully explained until Lesson 12 (pg. 73) but we are expected to apply it in Lesson 2 (according to Ajahn Bramali, this is a common construction associated with upasaṃkamati). And in the meantime we get to learn that tena is an instrumental pronoun on pg. 42 and yena is an instrumental relative pronoun on pg. 70). All very confusing to a beginner like me!

Warder Lesson 7 exercise 3 (translate from Pali):

desito Ānanda mayā dhammo

Which after grammatical analysis:

desito (passive action past participle, declined as nom m sg) Ānanda (name vocative) mayā (agent, declined as 1st pronoun instr sg) dhammo (patient, however declined as nom m sg due to passive verb)

Or literally

taught / Ānanda / by me / dhamma

Or

Ānanda, the dhamma has been taught by me.

Final example: Warder Lesson 10 exercise 10 (translate from Pali):

kammaṃ kho pana me karontassa kāyo kilamissati

I won’t do a full grammatical analysis here, but it is important to note “me karontassa” are not genitives of kāyo which is how I initially read it but is an example of ‘genitive absolute‘, see Warder p.58. So the translation is:

However, while I am doing the work, (my) body will become tired.

rather than my initial attempt:

Indeed however, my body that did work is tired.

This translation is wrong because it is not my body that did the work, it is me. As Warder explains in pg. 58: “The agent in the absolute nexus is different from the agent of the main sentence.”

These examples hopefully illustrate why it is important to document the grammatical analysis as part of the translation, and a straight word for word transliteration may result in erroneous interpretation.

A well-atested difficulty for language teachers is that different learners (and also the same learner at different steps in the journey) benefit from different amounts of grammatical explanation, so John’s advice here is spot on:

Warder is a difficult textbook, and one of its difficulties is that features are presented pages before they are fully explained. In the short term it may help you to look up things like the correlative construction and genitive absolute in de Silva’s Pali Primer and its key:

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This is very true!

Warder is not really for beginners, most students will greatly benefit from some time with both Pali Primer and Gair & Karunatillake first.

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Thanks, Gillian. Can you please point out exactly where in Pali Primer “correlative construction and genitive absolute” are covered? I can’t seem to find them, also not in the “Pali Primer Language Guide” which I also have a copy of. I also can’t find any references to yena “governing” the nominative. Warder seems to cover more ground in Lesson 1 than Pali Primer does in the entire book!

Someone also told me to be a bit careful with Pali Primer because the sentences and the vocabulary may not be representative of what is found in the suttas. Kind of like learning Japanese from a textbook and then discovering real Japanese speakers do not speak like that. Are you able to comment from your experience?

Totally true. The example sentences and vocabulary in PP are not from the suttas, and are often not representative. That’s why the Gair and Karunatillake, “A New Course in Reading Pāḷi”, is much better. All the exercises are canonical. The only thing in PP I think is useful for beginners is for those people learning Pāli who are unfamiliar with concepts like nominative, accusative, genitive, etc., it provides a gentle introduction to the idea of noun declensions. In that case, drop it after the first 8 chapters or so and move on to G&K or something else.

Both Gillian and Stephen said that Warder is not really a good beginner Pāli, despite it’s title, and I agree. But that’s what Bhante has chosen to use for this course, so stay with it, and just ignore (for now) what is not understandable, and comeback and go through it again later, when many things will fall better into place.

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Don’t bother looking in PP for these.
Correlative : See G&K II.6 (p.24)
Genitive Absolute: See G&K, X.1 (p.138)
And as to the yena … tena … construction, it’s very idiomatic, and can’t really be explained with a grammatical breakdown. Just get familiar with it as it it comes up very, very frequently in the canon! See G&K VI.10 for a brief description.

One can “sort of” rationalize it thus. Take the example “devo amanusso yena tathāgato ten’upasaṃkamati”.
By which (place) the deva, a non-human (is), by that (place), the Tathāgata approached. :slight_smile: Like I said, it’s an idiom!

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