Sujato/John Kelly Pali Courses: Resources

Events Pali Course
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A collection of useful resources for Pali students, especially focusing on those working through the Pali course.

Gair & Karunatillake

A New Course in Reading Pali by Gair & Karunatillake.pdf (7.5 MB)

Bhikkhu Bodhi’s audio lessons for Gair & Karunatillake

https://archive.org/details/NewPaliCourse

Grammar Summaries for Gair & Karunatillake

A helpful resource provided by @Dana
G&K Grammar Summaries.pdf (1.3 MB)

Vocabulary List for Gair & Karunatillake

Gair & Karunatillake Vocab.pdf (299.0 KB)

‘Exercise Book’ for Gair & Karunatillake

This contains @Dana’s key.
G&K Exercise Book.pdf (1.1 MB)

Answer key for Gair & Karunatillake

G&K John Kelly Answer Key 2021.pdf (846.7 KB)

Warder

Justin Meiland’s supplement to Warder

https://discourse.suttacentral.net/uploads/short-url/n3ssRievgRQKfvTzqfKhNT3RDh7.pdf

Answer keys for Warder

Aj Brahmali’s Warder key.pdf (796.9 KB)

A. K. Warder Pali Answer Key.pdf (1.1 MB)

Learn Pali Videos

These include excellent lessons structured around Warder. Highly recommended if you want to reinforce learning.

AK Warder Anki flashcards

  • Install Anki

https://ankiweb.net/about

  1. Click on “library”
  2. Enter “Pali” into the search field
  3. Select the Warder deck
  4. Click "Duplicate Deck. "

Bran’s revision tool for Warder

Useful for memorising and self-testing on Warder’s chapters.

Johansson

Digital Pali Dictionary

This is an awesome and ever-improving dictionary based on the well-established cross-platform Golden Dict. I use it all the time.

Basically, install Golden Dict, add the DPD, then you can click on any word in any application and get an instant lookup with grammatical analysis, inflections, and so on.

https://digitalpalidictionary.github.io/

Magadhabhasa

This is an extremely comprehensive grammar. Too much for initial study, but super-useful to look up things not found elsewhere.

Syntax of the cases

Anandajoti’s edition of Wijesekera’s classic study on the syntax of noun cases. A fantastic piece of work, and covers many obscure situations. Again, not for beginners, but keep it in your pocket for reference.

https://www.ancient-buddhist-texts.net/Textual-Studies/Syntax-of-the-Cases/

Nyanatusita’s lookup tables

Super handy!

Full pronoun chart

“Complete” table for Pāli pronoun declensions
Source unknown, from the Bhavana Society via Ayya @Sobhana

Andrew Olendzki’s translation strategy

On the topic of how one should approach a completely new passage of Pāli and begin to make some sense of it, then Andrew Olendzki, formerly of the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, had some helpful hints on getting started. See here:

Pali Translation Strategy.pdf (201.1 KB)

Ven Ānandajoti’s excellent page on numerals:

https://www.ancient-buddhist-texts.net/Textual-Studies/Grammar/Pali-Numbers.htm

Alan McLure’s notes on Pali compounds:

Pali Compound Reference Sheet.pdf (111.2 KB)

Christie’s visualizations

Awesome work!

Suttas for memorization

I recommend memorizing prose suttas to aid learning the language. Start with the first three discourses.

Listening to suttas

A recommended way of doing this is to use SCVoice.
There is a discussion of how to access Voice here.

Suttas read and chanted aloud.

These are mainly Venerable Jiv’s sutta chantings, with some from Frankk (maintained by @BethL).

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14hd872VeebgRrdY8H_dPUhOpZxNimUTn

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I wasn’t sure whether I should share this, but since I hit the publish button and now it’s on the internet I may as well post the link. This is a (work in progress) summary of my grammar notes from studying Warder Lessons 1-12 (the content of the course). I will be modifying it over time, and add additional Lessons (my intention is cover up to at least Lesson 16 which are the fundamentals of Pali grammar).

Grammar notes for Warder Lessons 1-12

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Folks might find some of these resources useful:

Thanks to our own Ven. @Khemarato.bhikkhu for putting them together.

And if people on Windows don’t have a way to type the Unicode Pali letters, there is a simple app to download here that will give you shortcut keys.

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Dhammacakkappavattanasutta:

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I’ve created a small collection of examples of Pali sentences that illustrates specific grammatical “patterns” - all taken from the exercises in Warder.

So far, up to Lesson 2, the sentences are relatively simple, so I’ve extracted four “examples” from the exercises. I’ll try and add more examples to the collection as the course progresses.

I welcome feedback and suggestions on any additional patterns that you may think is worthwhile to include in this collection. Please limit the examples to material covered in the course/Warder only for the time being - otherwise it might get confusing too early.

The sentences are presented as “pseudo class diagrams” illustrating the grammatical analysis of how each word contribute to the sentence, and the classification of the words in accordance with their inflectional endings. I’ve used Unicode symbols to represent singular vs plural, 1st/2nd/3rd person, masculine/feminine etc. and numbers to represent the cases (1 = nominative, 2 = accusative etc.) in accordance with Pali grammar convention. Use the key at the top of the page to decode the symbols.

Believe it or not, it is a “trilinear” translation - but not expressed linearly, but as a hierarchical tree.

I would also like feedback on whether the diagram format is appropriate and easy to understand. I would ideally have preferred a different diagram style, but the diagrams are drawn in something called “mermaid” which is optimised for these kind of diagrams. It is not a general purpose diagramming tool so I am limited by the diagram types it supports.

Example Sentences from Warder

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Thank you, Gillian! I also have found a site with many of the suttas chanted (by various monastics) – including the three recommended by Bhante for memorization: https://www.audiotip.org
The page is not completely intuitive but good enough for getting into AN, KN, DN, MN, and SN

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Digital Pali Dictionary is great! Using it on a Mac.
Interesting I can get the shortcut key to work in things like Word, but not in Sutta Central. I suppose it’s because it won’t work with online content?
Hardly a deal-breaker … now I feel no compulsion to buy a paper-based dictionary.
thanks

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It should work everywhere, but it can be a bit flaky. I have it working on SC. Try fiddling with the settings.

Christie, you’re doing great work! I’ll add these to the resources. These are fantastic for people looking for visual aids. Personally I’m more of a word person, but it really depends on personal modes of cognition. I’ll look into using some of these for the classes, if you don’t mind.

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Feel free to use them, you are welcome! I’ll add to the sentence patterns as the course progresses, hopefully before each session so that they reflect course progress.

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Reposted here on request of @sujato:

A list of Pali roots (about 1700), which conjugation group they belong in, their English meaning, the equivalent Sanskrit root and meaning, plus indexes into the various Pali grammar books they came from.

As you can see, the majority of verbs (just under 65%) belong in conjugation group 1 (bhūvādigaṇa) so if you encounter a word you don’t know, the chances are it’s in this group. The other groups are very small, quite often less than 100 roots per group.

This is the list of roots from various sources, summarised into a spreadsheet:

And these are the various books they came from:

Please enjoy and practice safe conjugation!

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I have downloaded the Anki & signed up, but I can’t see the “library”. Could anyone helps pls?

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https://suttafriends.org/help/type-pali-letters/
You can download a program(?) that allows you to type pali diacritics.

I also found this thread very helpful:

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Cannot find Pali keyboard solution for Mac :sneezing_face:

Greetings friends,
I tried to use the file + instructions from the following source in order to install/use a Pali keyboard for my Mac:

When I follow the instructions and try to add an “Other” keyboard, the Pali keyboard does not show up in the various list of options. This, in spite of the fact that I have added it to my library.

Is there another option for Macs? Or does someone know what’s going on here?

Thanks,
Beth

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The tipitaka.org Pali keyboard is the one I have used and recommended for years.

(Also where I find online suttas. It seems very backwards-compatable with my old laptop. )

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Dear Rev.Sanghamitta,

Has this been resolved? If not, are you using Mac or a Personal Computer?
Best wishes,

Beth

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Thanks, stephen.

I installed it correctly (it would seem); however, I can’t figure out how to make the keyboard render in pali characters, even though I have selected EasyUnicode as the source keyboard.
Thanks for any suggestions! (I assume you have a Mac.)
Beth

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Hi Beth,

There should be a keyboard map that came with the download. I press and hold the option button on my Mac and then press the letter with diacritical.
Option n gives n underdot, option m gives m underdot, option less than sign m overdot, etc.
Holding both control and option down and then pressing n gives the eng sign.

I hope this works for you- even I can do this!

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Hello Beth,

Not sure if this is helpful… but there is this old post that might be of use?

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Hi Beth,
I have typing diacriticals without any downloads, and just using shortcut keys after programming my System Preferences.

Here’s a map of what my Text Replacement settings:

Screen Shot 2023-08-21 at 8.36.47 PM
Screen Shot 2023-08-21 at 8.36.47 PM1332×1200 108 KB

For the long letters, my shortcut key is: OPT + SHIFT + “,”
Then type ‘a’ or ‘i’ or ‘u’.
Hit “tab” to accept.

For the retroflex letters, it’s OPT + SHIFT + “.”
Then type ‘d’ or ‘t’ or ‘n’.
Hit “tab” to accept.

I’m probably logging more milliseconds per letter than everybody else who’s downloaded a thing, but I like avoiding adding things to my OS wherever possible. Maybe this will help.

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