How to start learning Sanskrit: an eight week plan

Sanskrit has a reputation for difficulty that puts off many people who would enjoy it. The reputation is half deserved. The grammar is large and exact. But if you read Hindi, you begin with advantages that a learner from outside India can only envy: you know the script, you know thousands of the words, and the sentence order is your own. This plan uses those advantages. It asks for twenty to thirty minutes a day.

What you already have

The script. Devanagari. You can read every word aloud from the first day.
The words. जल, अग्नि, सूर्य, विद्या, गुरु, मित्र, पुस्तक, गृह, नगर: the formal vocabulary of Hindi is Sanskrit. Words used unchanged are called tatsama.
The order. The verb comes last in both languages.
Sandhi and compounds. You use them daily in Hindi: विद्यालय, सूर्योदय, राजपुत्र.

What is new

Endings instead of small words. Where Hindi says राम को, राम से, राम का, Sanskrit says रामम्, रामेण, रामस्य.
Three numbers. One, two and many.
Three genders. Hindi has two.
Verbs that change with person, not gender. पठति is "he reads" and "she reads".
Sandhi that is written down.

The eight weeks

Week	Learn	Do
1	Sounds: the final "a", visarga, anusvara, ऋ. Greetings.	Read the greetings aloud daily. Introduce yourself in four Sanskrit sentences.
2	Present tense with I, you, he: -आमि, -असि, -अति. Daily life sentences.	Describe your morning in six sentences.
3	The cases: what each one does. First and second case of राम.	Make ten "X sees Y" sentences, changing the nouns.
4	The whole Rama table, by chanting. Then फल.	Chant the table morning and evening. Write it from memory on day seven.
5	लता; the pronouns अहम्, त्वम्, सः, सा, तत्.	Translate ten simple Hindi sentences with "my", "your", "his".
6	The full verb table in the present; then future and past. Numbers to ten.	Put five verbs through the present table aloud.
7	The five vowel sandhis. Twenty avyayas.	Split twenty sandhi words you know from Hindi.
8	How to read a shloka. Two easy verses.	Work out Gita 2.23 and 4.8 by the four-step method.

Methods that work for Sanskrit

Chant the tables. This is not old-fashioned; it is efficient. The tables were made to be chanted, and rhythm fixes them in memory far faster than silent reading.
Speak small sentences. Spoken Sanskrit, even ten sentences a day about your own life, turns dead forms into living ones. See the sentence pages.
Learn a verse a week by heart. A memorised shloka is a portable grammar book: every case and verb form in it is ready to be recalled as an example.
Use your Hindi, carefully. Guess meanings from Hindi, but check them. A few words have shifted in meaning: अवकाशः, a "holiday" in Hindi, first means "space, room, opportunity" in Sanskrit.
Write. Copy a verse and its word-split by hand. Writing slows the eye down enough to notice every ending.

What to expect

After eight weeks you will not read the Mahabharata. You will be able to say simple things, recognise the cases and the common verb forms, take apart easy sandhi, and work through a plain verse with a word list. That is a real foundation, and it is exactly what the first year of school Sanskrit aims at. From there the road is long and pleasant: more noun and verb tables, the participles, the compounds, and then reading, which is the point of it all.

Where to go next

For systematic study you will need a graded textbook and, ideally, a teacher. School textbooks for classes six to ten give a gentle, well-ordered course. Conversation classes in simple Sanskrit are run in many towns. And every Sanskrit department of a university or a traditional pathshala will tell you where to begin. This site is a companion for the first steps: tables to chant, sentences to say and verses to understand.

The grammar on this site is the standard grammar taught in schools, set out in a simple form. Exceptions and finer points are left to full textbooks.