Thirty-two easy lessons in Pali, each including basic vocabulary, brief grammatical explanations and exercises. The book provides beginners a good introduction to basic Pali grammar.
The present work is an entirely new effort based on the same principle of teaching grammar through composition, using a gradually expanding controlled vocabulary, selected on the basis of types frequently occurring in the language. Cases are introduced one by one using only masculine nouns ending in -a at he beginning, with exercises in sentence formation with present tense, third person, singular and plural verbs whose bases end in -a. Grammatical forms such as the gerund / absolutive and the infinitive, which are very frequent in the language are soon introduced to enable the student to form longer and more complex sentences.
Once the student has mastered the basic structure, other grammatical syntactical forms are taught one by one, following the principle of introducing forms which bear a similarity / affinity in morphology to those already learnt. Translation from and into Pali form an integral part of each lesson.
This book is meant for beginners and gives only an introduction to Pali grammar. It is designed as a convenient stepping stone to more advanced works such as A.K. Warder´s Introduction to Pali.
Published by Vipassana Research Institute, 1994