View Poll Results: Which language should I learn?

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  • Sanskrit

    21 67.74%
  • Hindi

    10 32.26%
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Thread: Should I learn Sanskrit or Hindi?

  1. #21
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    Re: Should I learn Sanskrit or Hindi?

    Hindi is quite easy to learn
    Sanskrit is a little harder and requires more effort.

    If you learn Sanskrit, Hindi will be easy.

  2. #22
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    Re: Should I learn Sanskrit or Hindi?

    Namaste,

    OP asked for our opinion on March 4 2010. People coming out with their advice now are probably too late as the OP must have already learned and mastered one or both languages.

    Pranam.

  3. #23
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    Re: Should I learn Sanskrit or Hindi?

    Hari Bol!

    I recently found out he's been viewing this thread for 4 years straight! J/K.

    I didn't realize.

    Jai Sri Radhe-Syam
    "Hare Krisha Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare" ¬ The Glorious Mahamantra. Chant this 108 times a day and keep Samsara away

  4. #24
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    Re: Should I learn Sanskrit or Hindi?

    Learn Sanskrit..its much easier than most regional languages..the grammar of Sanskrit is very organized.

    Samskrita Bharati and Rasthriya Sanskrit Sansthan has self study books...in fact one does not even need a Guru for study of Sanskrit..most of us who reside abroad have no access to a Sanskrit Guru and dont even know Hindi or any regional language yet self study was really 100% possible.

    I have no idea why many people think Sanskrit is hard..if you ask me I am a person who self studied Sanskrit and I found it so systematic and so scientific that you brain will crave for more.

    You can also approach Samskrita Bharati to join up for spoken Sanskrit camps and also to sit for their 2 years correspondence self study course(but that course is actually not for an absolute beginner..so meanwhile get self study books from Rasthriya Sanskrit Sansthan New Delhi study that for a while then sign up for the correspondence course by Samskrita Bharati.

    Also we actually learn a language faster if we speak it..so try to get someone to speak with you just some simple word and later you can actually progress into a full conversation..its not that hard..in fact I like speaking in Sanskrit to my best friend these days cos others might not understand and we can actually Gossip!LOL

  5. #25
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    Re: Should I learn Sanskrit or Hindi?

    Hari Bol!

    Does anyone know any site where i can learn sanskrit

    Jai Sri Radhe-Syam!
    "Hare Krisha Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare" ¬ The Glorious Mahamantra. Chant this 108 times a day and keep Samsara away

  6. #26

  7. #27

    Re: Should I learn Sanskrit or Hindi?

    I ought to add here that I see unintentional signs of Sanskrit phobia that we need to examine. I have to self-examine that myself, coming from European ancestry. Here's a great article from Rajivji that details that (yes, I will eventually read all 74 of his articles in his archive).

    http://rajivmalhotra.com/library/art...nskrit-phobia/

  8. #28
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    Re: Should I learn Sanskrit or Hindi?

    Namaste,

    Thank you for providing those links.
    Quote Originally Posted by deafAncient View Post
    Is Sanskrit really a dead language?
    Sanskrit is not a dead language but a dormant language. With the dedication that some people are showing in learning it per the links, it might some day make a comeback and become the Indian national language.

    It is interesting to note that in the Washington Post article, the language is very presumptuous and harsh. The comment, 'Such camps, run by volunteers from Hindu nationalist groups, are designed to promote a language long dismissed as dead, and to instill in Hindus religious and cultural pride' makes you feel that the only people who promote and teach are some kind of evil 'nationalist groups'. The second thing that stood out and bothered me was the comment, 'The scholars warn against exploiting Indians' reverence for Sanskrit to promote the supremacy of Hindu thought in a country that, while predominantly Hindu, is also home to a large Muslim population and other religious minorities.' These self professed scholars sound more like the Hindu bashing idiots who would demean and degrade everything Hindu. If India is a Hindu nation, what is wrong with the Hindu culture and the Hindu thought being the dominant fabric of everyday life? How is that threatening to anyone? People educated in missionary schools are in the name of secularism, turned into Hindu bashers and are termed as 'the scholars'. That is the curse that India has to live with and prosper in spite of.

    Pranam.

  9. #29

    Re: Should I learn Sanskrit or Hindi?

    Namaste Believer,

    I noticed that about the Washington Post article. You have to remember that especially in this news outlet, there are connections between them and academia (at least there was at the time of publication of "Invading the Sacred").

    Reading here, especially in Part 1 - http://rajivmalhotra.com/library/art...eocolonialism/ - I finally came to the realization as to "who stole MY world." I've been angry, wondering who stole my world, for years. The answer in Part 1 towards the end before Part 2 didn't jump out at me the first time I read it.

    I realized this morning that I must learn Sanskrit to the best of my ability in order to restore as much of my world as possible. I feel like because I "let it go" somewhere in a previous life, I was made to experience what it is like to be a westerner, to devolve karmically in order to understand why I must return to the Dharmic path, as it were, before I can evolve further in my reawakening.

    I'm now seeing the urgency in learning Indian Classics and the language of sanskriti land. Only 1% of millions of Sanskrit works have been translated out to a non-Indian language. How much knowledge is missing??? How much is lost as a result of past invasions? How far ahead was Ayurveda of western medicine at the time of encounter? Did these invasions set back India thousands of years??

    It's becoming clearer to me just how backwards the juxtaposition of Indic and Western ways of life is.

  10. #30

    Re: Should I learn Sanskrit or Hindi?

    Namaste, Believer:

    Reading your last post more carefully (as I work on the weekends), I agree with several things. Indeed, Sanskrit is merely dormant, because as soon as it becomes alive again, as it is already being used again in the communities, new concepts and ideas are explored until finally they are understood to have existed before and became forgotten as a result of the foreign invasions; that they are merely bringing back what was before, plus the language or vocabulary may undergo changes to fit the current needs and environments of the times (for instance, was there a Sanskrit word for computer, IC chip, math coprocessor, laser surgery, computer keyboard, mouse in the distant past? The speakers would have to come up with such terminology to adapt to the changing surroundings, keeping the language alive and current). What bothers me about the "dead language" designation is the idea that a given people, with their language and culture, were conquered and wiped out, so they should not "come back" under the power and strength of the western conquerors. I am glad that you brought up the idea of a language being dormant, not dead, as there will be a time when the western way of life comes to pass, and the Dharmic way of life returns somehow, and Sanskrit comes back. It already has come back. My hope is that it is now on a rising trajectory of awareness.

    Again, I see now more clearly that I must learn Sanskrit among other things, even though I'm not trained to learn languages well because of my deafness and lack of resources to help me learn the best way to acquire a second language. My second language is American Sign Language, and it is very weak, as I only use it when I have the opportunity to use it. I'm not able to converse fluently in anything else at this time except Galeh Yuvo, which is what it looks like in my avatar to the left of my username. It is a language I created 30 years ago for some reason... All I know is that it is based on a form of an abugida writing system, like Sanskrit and Hindi are, and the vocabulary is generated via a translation method (that's not what it is, but I cannot reveal exactly how the vocabulary is generated). Imagine my surprise when I learned about the writing system of Hindi and Sanskrit! Somehow I knew about it before I had access to computers and language books. The differences have to do with the use of inherent vowels and what to do with them in particular situations within my language. https://www.facebook.com/galeh.yuvo - Here, you can see more of it and what it looks like in written form.

    The various statements in the article shows the western-centric way of thinking that gives away their position on such matters. Also, you see that they look at SD from a history-centric, Abrahamic perspective, which is not at all how SD is positioned and constructed to be.

    "Supremacy of Hindu thought..." This is what I mean by the above paragraph. They don't understand that this is not how Sanaatanis see themselves. This is the divide between pluralism and exclusivism. While they don't see (hopefully not) that all religions are the same, they see a need to acknowledge the differences in the religions from an equal footing as opposed to the supreme footing as experienced in the Christian/Muslim mindsets.

    On your last comment about Hindu culture; the idea behind colonization was to "rescue" primitive peoples from themselves and remake them as civilized westerners, to stamp out SD from every aspect of life. I think that the reason westerners feel threatened is because they assume that Sanaatanis think the same as themselves, that if they were given all the money in the world and a high-powered military, that they would naturally go after and attack the west on its own initiative, just as the west had done on non-western countries and regions. This is a failure to understand that there are different ways of being and living besides western civilization, not the only valid way to be.

    Now, please understand that I have yet to read the scriptures and the writings of SD, so I may be wrong here, but I seem to think it possible that long before the Vedas and other writings came to be in visible form (writings, carvings, whatever they used to make it visible to learners), that people in ancient times lived with very much the same western-like and Abrahamic-like mindset and found it lacking and destructive, evolved from it, and may have learned to bring forth SD and eventually passed it on in a regular way to ensure peace and survival within our world. Maybe the knowledge of SD comes from experience in the past. Remember that the Yugas happen in an endless cycle, and maybe the knowledge of SD is reinforced by the experience of the previous cycle of the Kali Yuga. Please advise on this paragraph.

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