We at Wisdom & Wonders have put online the first five parts of Introduction to Pali by Ajahn Brahmali.
This course is based on the book of the same name by A.K. Warder. It is separated into 23 parts and covers the first 16 chapters of the book. There are approximately 20 hours of material, including lessons and exercises. Currently there are 5 parts available. Hopefully we will be adding a new part each week. Part 6 is due to be published on 27th January 2018.
There is no new material in the course, but hopefully we have re-packaged it in a nice, easy to use format, which may also be a useful reference for those who have already taken the course.
Any comments, criticisms, suggestions, error corrections etc. can either be added to this thread or you can send them to me in a private message as you wish. For help with Pali and the course content you could just make a general post in an appropriate section.
Wow! Stu, this is beyond amazing, I started following this same Pali courses a few times already (I made a download optimised copy when they were first made available by Bhante @Brahmali and were still buried deep in a post somewhere), but between listening and pausing the audio and trying to find the right page in a never-be-able-to-stay-open-for-long format of Warderās Introduction to Pali I never made it past chapter 8 or so. I will definitely give this a try again, it looks super user friendly.
Kudos and to all who participated in providing and preparing this resources!
Thanks musiko. In a few months after we have finished putting the resources up on the website, I was going to ask you if you could weave your magic and put together an optimised version for those who prefer offline study / those with low bandwidth internet connections, and upload them here with the excellent resources that you have been uploading recently. I think that the web pages with the active elements removed could be bound into a PDF fairly easily, and still retain some usefulness. My main focus will be releasing the content over the next few months and then Iāll have an look into this.
I would be absolutely thrilled to do so! In factāI already did it! And not only for this course but for the other two courses also . I was going to upload them here soon (with caveat, see below), but since you are making such a marvellous site I will definitely postpone it until you finish preparing the entire course.
And while we are on topic, I remember this thread:
As I said before, I have already made a download optimized version of the (three) pali courses led by Ajahn @Brahmali for my personal study when they were offered here (and still are, if one knows where to look ).
But since Ayya @Vimala has made some editsāI must admit that at least for the first part I found nothing much was superfluous (the pace is quite slow and yet sometimes still too fast for my current skill level); so I guess there must be some higher attainments declared by the monks at the completion of the course, hence the edits āI would like to first ask Bhante @Brahmali if it is OK to post all three courses as-is in download optimised form or is it preferable to put just this (edited) version Stu is using?āin which case I would ask Ayya @Vimala for access to edited files.
Yes. The edited ones will fit with the timings on the website (and eventually the pdf of the webpages), so they are the ones to go for from my point of view.
Also: āLesson 8 - 2013-01-31.mp3ā is hiked out of the other āIntroā course and fits between ā07_Chp6Q&A+Chp7 Lesson.mp3ā and ā08_Chp8 Excercise Q&A.mp3ā. - I have renamed all of my files (in a rather simplistic manner - ITP01.mp3, ITP02.mp3 ā¦) and edited the track numbers to reflect this insertion.
Deal! I will use the edited files then. There will be the least errors if use your already renamed files (since re-encoding should retain file names as well as mp3 tags ), can you maybe merge them into Ayyaās Google repository (providing we manage to clear the technical problems with access)? Thx!
@Vimala, I donāt think I have ever thanked you for editing the Pali lessons. I wasnāt even aware that you had done so. Thank you so much for doing this. You are one of the most selfless givers I have ever met!
I have no doubt the editing was needed. Sometimes the classes got a bit out of hand!
And so I think it is probably best not to use the unedited files. Anyway, thank you so much for your generous contribution!
Thank you! But it was a good insentive for me to pick up my pali study again. You might recall I asked you about those files some 1.5 years ago and you said you wanted to make sure they were edited before releasing them to the general public, so I did. But I did not find much that really needed editing.
@stu I really love what you have done. Iād love to have an offline version of the site (with the player and jumpability) is it possible to get the site as a zip?
Wisdom & Wonders is our first adventure into the wonderful world of web development, and we never designed it to be available off-line. In fact we never really designed it at all. ā¦ In essence it is something of a Frankensteinās monster with code from various community programmers and free āpluginsā sewn together and sitting on top of WordPress, which is essentially a blogging tool. So the short answer is no, sorry we canāt do an offline version in the short term.
At the moment we are considering the website as a prototype really. Looking into the longer future we want to make the site what is known as a āProgressive Web Appā, which is what the new Sutta Central website is going to be, I believe. This means (I think) that it wonāt matter too much if you are online or offline, it should work. But there is much learning to do before we can embark on that. At the same time we want to keep up with adding new content to the site and expanding the ways that people can engage with the learning process.
In the medium term (i.e. after we have finished the entire course - around May this year), I want to look at maybe getting together a downloadable offline version of just the Introduction to Pali course. The main bit of technology there is the audio player (with ājumpabilityā - love that word ) which was written by me (my first bit of programming for a couple of decades!), so hopefully it will not be too taxing to get something together that is similar to the web experience and will be available for download.
Iām so happy that you like what has been done. Thank you. And Iām really pleased that people seem to be engaging and sticking with the course via the website so far, although we (deliberately) donāt really collect many stats at the moment.
. I was going to upload them here soon (with caveat, see below), but since you are making such a marvellous site I will definitely postpone it until you finish preparing the entire course.
).
), can you maybe merge them into Ayyaās Google repository (providing we manage to clear the technical problems with access)? Thx!
ā¦ In essence it is something of a Frankensteinās monster with code from various community programmers and free āpluginsā sewn together and sitting on top of WordPress, which is essentially a blogging tool. So the short answer is no, sorry we canāt do an offline version in the short term.
) which was written by me (my first bit of programming for a couple of decades!), so hopefully it will not be too taxing to get something together that is similar to the web experience and will be available for download.