A Sanskrit Primer

Good print quality what is essential to read devanagari font. Book is the best for learning sanskrit, as I know.

Writing with an inestimable bias, this is one of the great text books.

The print quality is worse than imaginable.Devanagari sections are indiscernible blobs of ink.Don't buy this edition, or you'll be as sorry as I am.

Let's face it: Sanskrit is just not the kind of language for which it makes any sense to learn cute dialogues and touristy phrases like "Where is the train station?" or "I need an eye doctor." The latter may, in fact, come in handy when you first learn the Devanagari script, but what motivates you to learn Sanskrit anyway? There is a very good reason to become familiar with the language, namely the fact that many contemporary translations of Sanskrit writings, most notably of the Bhagavad Gita, take incredible liberties in passing off as translations wordings that hardly even qualify as paraphrases, and often just plain misrepresent the text. To get to the actual meaning, you need to learn the language, but there is no shortcut to doing so.Sanskrit often uses cases, such as the instrumental case or the locative, in order to express something that in other languages would be done with prepositions. There is not just a singular and plural; there is also a "dual" form for both nouns and verbs. In the Devanagari script, combinations of letters form new symbols; when words follow each other in certain sequences, the vowels change: e.g. the stem "bhu" ("to exist"), yields the noun "bhavas" ("existence"), which, however, if followed by a word such as "vidyate" ("it is found"), switches to "bhavo."I am mentioning all of this simply to make the case that, yes, Perry's Sanskrit Primer is a hard book to work through. But that's only because Sanskrit, if treated seriously, is a hard language. It takes work to get through it, and if you're not even used to simple ancient Indo-European languages, such as Greek or Latin, it's going to be twice as hard. But I don't see how you can really do an adequate job of it without committing yourself to good old-fashioned memorization.Perry's Primer asks a lot of you. It treats you with an expectation of maturity. But, forgive me for stating this so bluntly, if you're not ready to live up to Perry's expectations, I'm not sure you're ready to study Sanskrit seriously.

Complete waste of money. Photocopy very poor. Unreadable in parts. Do not bother with this book unless you know Sanskrit already

the Devanagari is illegible. Do NOT get this book