<story><title>Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)</title><url>http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/05/23/oppenheimer-gita/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Mugwort</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve wanted to study Sanskrit for a while now but nobody around where I live can teach it.  So I&amp;#x27;ve been nibbling at at occasionally.  Some points of pronunication are a bit vague such as there being two kinds of T&amp;#x27;s and D&amp;#x27;s which sound almost identical to me.  I&amp;#x27;ve read the Gita and the Uphanishad s in English (Eaknath Easwaran&amp;#x27;s translation).  Here&amp;#x27;s my impression.  It&amp;#x27;s definitely worth reading through a translation.  You can read it not as philosophy or religion but simply to read it.  That&amp;#x27;s why I read it.  To climb the mountain of life a little bit higher to see more.  To see a tiny bit of what men like Oppenheimer, Ghandi, Thoreau and 1.3 billion others have been inspired.  I can now read most Devanagari characters, enough to recognize simple words when they appear to me in stores like &amp;quot;Dharma&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Karma&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Tantra&amp;quot; etc. That said, I identify more closely with Judaism than anything else.  You need a place to call home.  Still, the Sanskrit language is fascinating and the Hindu scriptures have made a deep impression on me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nemo</author><text>If you know German, Latin, or Greek it helps for understanding inflection in Sanskrit. Otherwise learning the eight cases of Sanskrit nouns is going to be really hard. I studied Sanskrit for a while many years ago in a Classic dept where I&amp;#x27;d been studying Greek and Latin (alas, I can barely read Devanagari now), and it was mostly straightforward to understand the structures for the nouns and verbs - learning all the forms takes time and work and you need that to parse the syntax. But it&amp;#x27;s Sandhi that makes the language unusually hellish. If you&amp;#x27;ve got a critical text or something with the works broken out, it&amp;#x27;s so not hard to read and get basics of syntax. But the originals of the classics the words are all compressed into long unbroken lines with subtle and difficult rules for joining words.</text></comment>
<story><title>Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)</title><url>http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/05/23/oppenheimer-gita/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Mugwort</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve wanted to study Sanskrit for a while now but nobody around where I live can teach it.  So I&amp;#x27;ve been nibbling at at occasionally.  Some points of pronunication are a bit vague such as there being two kinds of T&amp;#x27;s and D&amp;#x27;s which sound almost identical to me.  I&amp;#x27;ve read the Gita and the Uphanishad s in English (Eaknath Easwaran&amp;#x27;s translation).  Here&amp;#x27;s my impression.  It&amp;#x27;s definitely worth reading through a translation.  You can read it not as philosophy or religion but simply to read it.  That&amp;#x27;s why I read it.  To climb the mountain of life a little bit higher to see more.  To see a tiny bit of what men like Oppenheimer, Ghandi, Thoreau and 1.3 billion others have been inspired.  I can now read most Devanagari characters, enough to recognize simple words when they appear to me in stores like &amp;quot;Dharma&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Karma&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Tantra&amp;quot; etc. That said, I identify more closely with Judaism than anything else.  You need a place to call home.  Still, the Sanskrit language is fascinating and the Hindu scriptures have made a deep impression on me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>monktastic1</author><text>Hindi has basically the same phonemes as Sanskrit. Any Hindi speaker should be able to pronounce the two d&amp;#x27;s and t&amp;#x27;s for you. And if you can find one who also speaks unaccented English, they can help you compare them with the English d and t. That said, by far the harder part of Sanskrit will be grammar and vocab.</text></comment>