SuttaCentral
greetings! round 2 of my post/response to join this beginner’s Pali class. i originally responded with my interest on another thread due to my unfamiliarity with this platform - apologies for these basic questions. will we receive confirmation of registration and where should i be looking for this if so?
with gratitude
Hello Manal. There is no formal registration for the course. It’s just a matter of responding on either of these threads expressing your interest, as you have done. See you on Zoom in 8 days time.
John
Greetings everyone.
I’m looking forward to meeting you all on Zoom in about 8 days time.
Note: I have renamed this thread as “… Class 1”, as opposed to “… Lesson 1”, as I had it originally. This is to avoid any confusion with the fact that the Gair and Karunatillake book is divided into 12 Lessons or chapters, and my Pāli classes won’t match those lesson numbers.
Next week will be a very introductory session where:
Over the following weeks, in general we will spend approximately two classes on each of the twelve G&K lessons, thus this course should run for about 25 weeks, in total.
While some of you who have signed up for this class have learned some Pāli in either the recent or distant past (including a few who were in the class with Bhante Sujato and me that finished last month), I know that most of you have no experience studying Pāli at all. And that is the level at which I will be pitching this class.
I assume everybody has by now the text book we will be using - A New Course in Reading Pāli by Gair and Karunatillake - or at least has it on order. Even though it is available as a pdf online, I recommend having the printed copy so you can write on it, mark it up, etc.
I use a Foxit program (free version) to take notes on the PDF file. An alternative to writing on our paper copy. 
Hi @johnk
Will the live zoom session be recorded and shared afterwards? Timezone clash.
Please let me know.
Thank!
I would like to enroll in the Pali class. Thank you.
Will the live zoom session be recorded and shared afterwards? Timezone clash.
Yes, it will be.
Welcome, Jim! Confirmed.
Yes, confirmed, Bindu
Reminder to all that our Pāli class starts tomorrow - Monday, 9am, Brisbane time for me, Sunday, 7pm US Eastern Daylight Savings time. For all attendees in the US, don’t forget to move your clocks forward one hour when you wake up tomorrow morning (Sunday), otherwise you’ll miss most of the class, and that wouldn’t do!
Hi John, I’d like to sign up for the class starting this afternoon. I do have the texts. I’d like to expand the number of chants I know and I’m hoping understanding some Pali will help with that.
Yes. Welcome, Matthew
Good to see everyone online today for our first class. Apologies for the few technical glitches when trying to share my screen with multiple diferent windows. Hope to have all that sorted by next week.
Here are the slides from the class:
SC Pali 2024 Slides Class 1.pdf (784.7 KB)
For those of you who missed the class or who only signed up for receiving recordings due to incompatible time differences, please contact @Sumana to learn where to find the recording.
I have started a new thread for next week ( with the same name as this one, only ending in ‘Class 2’) where I have posted the homework I would like you all to do before this class.
Sorry, I’m a bit late. Can I still sign up and watch the recording, please? Thank you
Yes, you may. Can you please tell me your name, @SuttaStation , and whether you have studied any Pāli before?
The class recording can be found at this link:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wRryTy5IISN9HlYpwb4yeodnuFyfC4z0?usp=sharing
John
Again, a big welcome to all Pāli students! It appears that 31 of you showed up on the Zoom session today, and it is both amazing to me and very gratifying that there are so many of you who wish to learn Pāli. Sadhu, sadhu to you all!
One puzzle for me, however, is that approximately 47 people or so expressed an interest in participating in the class, so there appear to have been about 16 no-shows. I really hope that that was not because of any confusion in how to join the Zoom session. [If so, see top of this thread for the Zoom link – and it is the same Zoom link for every class.] If you missed the class by accident, the recording and the slides are available.
While looking through the Chat text from the Zoom session after the class, I see there were a few queries posted that I wasn’t able to get around to answering. So, here they are with answers below.
From Indy Jayasinghe : I think it does but the order of the cases is different which can be confusing with gair
Yes, Indy, the Pāli grammar books in English can be quite inconsistent with the order of the different noun cases. Since this class will be based on the Gair and Karunatillake text book, that is the case order that we will stick with.
From Mario del Risco : How are the dictionary makers able to determine the meanings of the words?
Very good question, Mario! They were very clever people, obviously. I believe the first Pali-English dictionaries were compiled by linguists living in colonial Ceylon at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, and they would have spoken to local learned scholars there who knew Pāli and English and thus they painstakingly composed the first Pāḷi-English dictionaries. They no doubt would have been familiar with Sanskrit too, which is similar to Pāli in many ways.
From Way Chuang Ang (MY) : is there any other exercise with answer other than DeSilva’s book?
Yes, Way Chuang, there are answer keys available for the G&K and for Warder. When I worked through those books and did all the exercises, I posted my answers online, and other people have done so too.
From Indy Jayasinghe : With compound words is there a difference between the meaning of the whole result and the individual separate ones?
The short answer to this, Indy, is ‘yes’. Compounds are a somewhat complex subject that we will be going into in much more depth as we proceed further with the lessons. I will also talk about this a little at the start of our next lesson. [Remind me if I forget] I only really mentioned compounds today because I was introducing some of the distinctive features of the language.
From Mittakhantī (she/her) : is the stem a part of the natural language Pali (used in speech) or is it a grammar concept?
The noun stem, Mittakhantī, is more of a grammar concept. The only time you will see stem forms being used in the natural language, that is, in the texts, is when words comprise the component parts of a compound (other than the very last component). As I said above, I’ll talk a bit more about compounds in our next lesson and then you’ll see how stem forms are used.
Fellow students:
We will reference many resources and aids for learning pāli during John’s classes. Please make a habit of putting those in the Resources thread (see below) rather than within individual class threads.
John provided a list of his recommended resources in the Class 1 slides. (See this thread.)
The current Resources thread I’m referring to is daunting to scroll through. All of these legacy posts are likely a distraction for now. However I recommend scrolling through the Aug 2023 posts in that thread to:
Learn about installing the Digital Pali Dictionary (cited by John as a resource for our current course)
Learn about keyboard shortcuts for pāli diacritics (the special characters over and under certain letters)
