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Presents the facts of Sanskrit language primarily as they show themselves in use in literature, and only secondarily as they laid down by the native grammarians.3.0 out of 5 stars fast pace, lots of vocab February 14, 2008 By D. MitchellThere are only 22 chapters in this book so you get great bulks of input per chapter. For instance, chapter 3 gives present tense (active and middle), the “a” declension (masc. and neuter), the irregular verb “as” (to be), a look at the use of “sma” (a particle), and about 60 vocab words. Then, after all that, you are given about 15 practice exercises and a 7 1/2 lined paragraph to translate.This just isn’t enough. Compared to Latin and Greek, Sanskrit isn’t necessarily more difficult, there’s just a lot more to take in. It’s too much to retain and too little practice. Wheelock’s Latin for instance gives just a little bit of info. per chapter, only 20-25 vocab words (actually there are more but the author is specific as to which need to be memorized), a bunch of Latin to English, a few English to Latin, a nice sized paragraph to translate, extra practice in the back that focuses in on the topic at hand and comes with the answers, AND you can buy a workbook to go with all of that. This is spread across 40 chapters. It seems that all my Sanskrit textbooks want me to learn everything at once. Sanskrit is too complicated for that.However, this book does have a great chapter on sandhi and lots of reading. If one does Thomas Egenes first this is a great primer (although I like Samskrta-Subodhini better), but I wouldn’t recommend diving into this.Personally I do not like the idea of going all the way through Egenes just to turn around and start at the beginning of a primer. I wish there were a book that moves slow like Egenes but also gives a fuller lesson on the language like this book. I own just about all of the books available for learning Sanskrit along with the reference grammars and the dictionaries but have yet to find an equivalent to Wheelock’s Latin and Greek: An Intensive Course or Athenaze. It’s not that I wouldn’t recommend this book but buy Thomas Egenes’ Into. to Sanskrit parts 12 along with it and go through them first. That means you have to go through 3 texts before you can begin a reader like Lanman with facility, ugghh!Please contribute back by OCRing and Spellcheck/Proofreading this book. I recommend ABBYY Finereader 11 (or similar) for doing this work in a relatively easy way. If you plan to do that please leave a comment here so the effort won’t be duplicated by others. Please upload back the final pdf. Thank you.Please note that the high quality scan images are posted here for a specific purpose – to make it easy to OCR/spellcheck the book and not spend 100 hours doing that from a crappy, lossy compressed pdfs that are sometimes posted here. So please don’t waste your time asking why this is not a pdf file. Instead please contribute a few hours of your time and OCR and proofread the posted book. Thank you.