Pali Study Guide

Here’s my recommended Pali study guide. 1. Start with the Pali Primer by Lily de Silva. This is a very accessible introduction to the language, and provides lots of exercise sentences for translating Pali to English and also English to Pali. It goes at a nice slow pace and introduces gradually the important concepts of noun declension and verb conjugation, unfamiliar to most English speakers. It's main limitation is that it does not use examples from the suttas in its exercises and it's presentation of material in the later chapters lacks a little depth. It’s probably even best to stop using this book after you’ve gone through about half of it and when you are sick of translating sentences in the exercises like “The monkey climbs the tree and sees the lion”!! This book is easy to find, and even available to use directly from the internet (http://www.vri.dhamma.org/publications/pali/primer/index.html). Alternatively start with one of the other basic books like Narada's Elementary Pali, which is also freely available on the web. 2. After getting some basics under your belt, I strongly recommend The New Course in Reading Pali by Gair and Karunatillake. I have worked through it entirely and found that having completed the Pali Primer beforehand helped a lot, but is not absolutely necessary. The authors are very thorough in their treatment of the grammar and all the exercise material is directly taken from the suttas, which is a very good feature. My own answers for the exercises have been posted to the Pali Yahoo list, and are maintained on the tipitaka.net website (for info about both of these, see below). The drawback with this book is that there are only about 12 chapters and consequently each chapter contains an enormous amount of material. 3. The standard textbook Introduction to Pali by A. K. Warder covers all the basics in a very thorough way, and I would consider it a must for all serious Pali students eventually – but it is not a book for beginners. The exercise material is also right from the canon (specifically, the Digha Nikaya), and very useful in that respect. But many people find it to be a difficult book, and not for the faint of heart! Warder presents so much detail on each topic that this tends to be overwhelming and off-putting for someone just starting out. However, after tackling some other elementary texts first, then it becomes relatively easy to handle. My solutions to the exercises for the first 21 chapters are posted on access to insight at http://accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/kelly/answers/index.html and are also on the tipitaka.net website. 4. An excellent grammar reference book to have on hand is A Pali Grammar for Students by Steven Collins. The Pali English Dictionary (PED) published by the Pali Text Society is also a great book to eventually have as a resource material as you continue your Pali studies. This is available online at http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/pali/. 5. Further useful guidance on learning Pali can be found at http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bullitt/learningpali.html and at http://www.tipitaka.net/pali/#Pali%20Section.

Also I would recommend joining the Pali Yahoo group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Pali/. It’s not very active, but somethimes interesting questions come up and the experienced people on the list are generally very helpful answering questions from newcomers. Those are my thoughts. Good luck! With metta, John