Complete Sanskrit: A Comprehensive Guide to Reading and Understanding Sanskrit, with Original Texts (Teach Yourself)

Take a deep breath before embarking on this course - it's extremely thorough and takes no prisoners. If you're serious about learning Sanskrit, it's certainly the best textbook available in English, with very detailed explanations, and particular focus on syntax and compounds.It would be possible to raise gripes about this and that - for example, the grammatical explanations are very wordy and sometimes a bit indigestible, and I would have preferred the material divided into thirty rather than fifteen lessons - but nothing that would detract from my five-star rating.Each unit contains between 40 and 50 practice sentences, many of which startle with their strangeness ("But we are forest-dwellers, to whom riding in a chariot is unfamiliar" or "I do not of course truly have a passion for the ascetic's daughter"). If you learn these sentences well, you gain a good command of Sanskrit.I do have one big gripe about this edition - the devanagari text appears to have been reset in a different font, and in the process some errata have crept in (mainly missing vowel marks). I would recommend hunting down the original edition in a copy from the 1970s or the 1980s, in which there are no errors and the layout and fonts are far more attractive than in this edition.

Definitely not one for beginners, this textbook delves into fairly technical Sanskrit concepts early on. I bought it about a year and a half into my study of Sanskrit and am using it concurrently with Walter Maurer's The Sanskrit Language. I find the two books equally helpful - and equally challenging - and it is nice to have two textbooks focusing on different aspects of the language. I would definitely recommend both, but don't use either of them as your very first Sanskrit textbook - try Foundation Sanskrit by David Hodgkinson first.

The Devanagari texts are not always easy to read. My eyes get so tired when reading this textbook for my study.

A definitive reference volume for the student of Sanskrit, but not for beginners.Note that misleading product description confuses paperback with hardback editions.

Sintetic and accurate. A good starting point

Good comprehensive book

I chose this book because I am impressed with the Teach Yourself books generally. Coulson's book is good and helpful. What I don't like about the book is the use of small font size for the Sanskrit syllables. I would have liked the exercises in smaller incremental steps. In these respects Thomas Egenes' books (Sanskrit Parts 1 & 2) are far superior. So I would recommend to a prospective purchaser of books for learning Sanskrit ab initio to purchase both Coulson's and Egenes' books. AKM

A very comprehensive book , safely delivered ; thank you .