I’ve gone through several, probably most of the common Pāli learning resources so far. They’re alright to excellent for scholarly purposes, but I still think they throw far too much grammar and much irrelevant vocabulary up-front, rather than serving the needs of a practitioner.
The best toolset I’ve had pleasure using was Bhikkhu Bodhi’s “Reading the Buddha’s Discourses in Pāli”. It’s almost excellent, giving a very simple grammatical / linguistic explanation, jumping straight into the most important Suttas that one would be interested in learning.
I wondered to take myself up such a project, starting literally with “Namo tassa…” etc, explaining grammar on a need-to-know basis. That way, there’s a learning material not strictly for scholars, but for any English speaking practitioner, who just wants to learn how to decode and make use of various resources to read Pāli, learning what the most common and cherishes Suttas might mean in Pāli.
My question is: Are there any such practical / immersive materials that I might’ve missed?
Anki deck is planned to have all audio for the word. Exercises comes from vinaya or sutta, except for the first 2 classes I think.
You really do need to know a lot of grammar to get Pāli. And there’s a lot of exercises, so I guess this is what you mean by immersive?
Exercises are selected to be as much as possible following the grammar one has learnt so far. Vocab is according to the exercises. Takes 2 hours per day of homework, 1 hour anki, 1 hour exercises, if one does one class per week.
I started with doing a lot of different Pāli books together, SBS Pāli course is very challenging if one does it at one class per week, but more relaxed at one class per 2 weeks, make it so that there’s only 1 hour of homework per day. It’s very comprehensive, you learn roots which you don’t get from many other books, which does help in making one into very good analyser of any new Pāli words to try to guess the meaning.
I don’t mind having to do exercises which is not from the canon, but if your main issue is that you want the exercises from the canon, this is one of the best designed course for it. Anki is essential unless you’re ok with traditional brute force memorization. Especially with so many declension/conjugation tables.
A famous Pali teacher once joked to me that if you look at the existing Pali textbooks, the more the title suggests that they are simple/“made easy” the more difficult to understand they are. The Pali Primer is a good example. It claims to be basic but after the first few chapters the grammar explanations start to get more incomprehensible.
I mean, isn’t that the same thing as learning a language? What exactly is the difference you see?
