Sanskrit has been called the most difficult class at St. John’s College. Justin Lowe has provided a small collection of sanskrit and some other St John’s resources here:
Devanagari Transliteration Schemes and Typing Characters
There are a few transliteration schemes for Sanskrit, see Wikipedia’s Comparison Table.
Your textbook will likely teach IAST. This is easy to remember & write but hard to type, e.g. when search for words online in the Monier-Williams dictionary. That websites use SLP1 – where every Devanagari character is written in a single roman alphabet letter – for example: ड (ḍ in IAST) is typed as ‘q’, and ढ (ḍh in IAST) is typed as ‘Q’
Sanskrit Dictionaries online or loaded into phone apps
Monier-Williams and other dictionaries are available online at the Cologne Digital Sanskrit Dictionaries Site. But this can be a bit clunky on a phone.
I found a number of dictionaries availabe at indic-dict/stardict-sanskrit, but I found the instructions a bit confusing.
Go to: indic-dict/stardict-sanskrit’s index of dictionary files (which was copied from : indic-dict/stardict-index’s larger index of indexes) and download the Monier-Williams compressed file then get a phone dictionary app that can load in StarDict files (Dictionary Universal (?) on iPhone is what I use and is worth the $5, or Dicty works decently well for free)
Sanskrit Grammar Reference Tables
I originally copied the tables from the book, or retyped them myself, but after a while I wanted a more complete reference sheet.
I found the Sanskrit Garden of Paradigms to be incredibly useful. Also look at the Fancy Sanskrit Grammar Tables to remind you of more details. The two tables reference each other.
Nāgārjuna Chapter 25 packet
In class we used a photocopy of Chapter 25 of Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā.
My hope is to have at least some chapters of Nāgārjuna formatted in the Scharf/Rāmopākhyāna style. But that hasn’t happened yet.
In the meantime a PDF of the scanned packet we used in class is available here: nagarjuna-ch25.pdf
Scharf’s Rāmopākhyāna
For use with the Scharf/Rāmopākhyāna, I have taken most of the tables from the Introduction and put them in a one page spreadsheet to print out as a quick reference guide. It is currently in an Excel file in OneDrive, but I can’t create a publicly viewable link for more than 60 days, so please contact me if you want to make edits. Eventually I will probably save it directly here or reformat it in TeX, or some more reasonable format.
A PDF of the quick reference guide I compiled from the Introduction of the Scharf’s Rāmopākhyāna, can be found here: sanskrit-grammar-terms-tables-ramopakhyana-full.pdf
Most of it is applicable midway through 1st semester or 2nd semester.
ADDITIONAL TIPS:
Having the Sanskrit dictionaries on my phone helped a ton with homework – even if I did like flipping through those huge ancient dictionaries in the library sometimes.
Flash cards. I found Quizlet to be a decent mobile app and easy enough to import stuff into it. Here is my book marked search for ‘sanskrit’ (ha but there are quite a few flashcard decks that are just yoga poses, pretty neat but alas not useful in our readings)
https://quizlet.com/search?query=Sanskrit&type=sets
Here is one of the alphabet plus a couple of the very common conjuncts (e.g. T and R together looks only a little unexpected, but some are almost inexplicable to me)
https://quizlet.com/5866213/sanskrit-alphabet-flash-cards
Here is a search for those conjuncts, quite a few results and some decks with a ton of cards… That may be overkilll too early https://quizlet.com/search?query=Sanskrit-conjunct&type=sets
