Status Updates From Introduction to Sanskrit, P...

Okay so this is where my journey to Sanskrit really starts. Just got through with Lesson 1 and completed the exercises.

BRING ON THE SANDHI

The dēvanāgarī romanization system Egenes uses (IAST) is generally quite workable, but I'm really annoyed by his practice of not putting macrons on e and o, even though these are long vowels like ā, ī, ū. (The justification for this is that, unlike with the latter three, there's no short e or o that need to be differentiated from the long forms.) Going to make a habit of doing so anyway.

I've been looking at other introductory Sanskrit textbooks and am slightly stymied by the amount of typographical variation that the devanāgarī letters seem to exhibit. I'm reminded of Hofstadter's "Letter-Spirit problem" and his comments about METAFONT in "Metamagical Themas".

Ugh, I'm terrible at distinguishing aspirated from unaspirated consonants. I don't care about acquiring spoken fluency/listening comprehension, but still.

I guess I'm learning Sanskrit now!