As part of my ongoing sporadic attempts at learning Sanskrit, I have started compiling notes for Quick Reference from different books, each of which has its own approach to suit different levels of learners. Since it is my aim to read Sanskrit fluently--not speak or write it--and understand the meaning and nuances of the language, I need these compilations for ready reference, so I can go about learning Sanskrit more from the religious, spiritual and secular texts directly, than from books that seek to teach the language. I would be glad to share the notes here as and when they are ready to a point, with the hope other learners might find them useful and helpful in their own approaches.

001. Sanskrit learning tools

01. To learn Sanskrit effectively, one of the first things necessary is to get comfortable with knowing, writing, typing, recognizing and pronouncing Sanskrit alphabets.

• This book is a good source of getting used to all Sanskrit alphabets (with orthography) in the devanAgarI-lipiH script (also known as nAgarI), the most popular script for Sanskrit. (Another Sanskrit script used in South India is the grantha-lipiH):

Learn Sanskrit in 30 Days
http://download165.mediafire.com/jjs...in+30+days.pdf

• For typing Sanskrit script using the computer, three popular transliteration schemes are used: Romanized Sanskrit, ITRANS and Baraha.

Although individual preferences differ, both ITRANS and Baraha have the advantage of being free from diacritics, so they are easy to type and remember. This pdf document has all the three schemes:
http://www.speaksanskrit.org/other/transliteration.pdf

• For uchchAraNam--pronunciation, the audio files in this link could help:
http://kksongs.org/language/sanskrit.mp3

• A sure way to learn the right pronunciation of Sanskrit is to listen to shlokas and stotras sung by artistes like Uma Mohan. Some links:
http://www.youtube.com/results?searc...0l0l0l0l0ll0l0
http://www.24listen.com/uma-mohan.html

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02. Most masculine gender nouns in Sanskrit end in visargaH, which form is the first (nominative) case of the word. visargaH also plays an important role in saMdhi--coalescence of words, and in samAsa--compound words. Unfortunately, dictionaries like MWD (Monier Williams Dictionary) omit the visargaH in listing.

• So, it is important to have for reference a dictionary like VS Apte's, which retain the visarga-ending:
The Pracitcal Sanskrit-English Dictionary
http://www.archive.org/details/pract...skri00apteuoft

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03. Other sources for ready reference include:

• A shabda-manjjarI--compilation of words under grammatical categories:
The following book is a good sourcebook for cases, pronouns, numerals, conjugation of verbs, voices, indeclinables, etc.
shabda-manjjarI by KLV Sastry and L.Anantarama Sastry
http://sanskritebooks.org/2009/06/sabda-manjari/

• A dhAtu-rupa-manjjarI--compilation of roots of Sanskrit verbs
dhAtu-rupa-manjjarI by KLV Sastry and L.Anantarama Sastry
http://www.mediafire.com/?ojvjemwzmm0

dhAtu-koShaH by Bahuballab Shastri (roots in dictionary arrangement)
http://www.archive.org/download/Dhat...labhSastri.pdf

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04. An Indian language editor using the ITRANS scheme and with Unicode output features would be of great help for use on the Internet:

• Baraha could be the first choice. Although their latest free version comes with restrictions as to language, file size, etc. the older versions have no such restrictions, so Baraha 7.0 could be a good choice:
https://rapidshare.com/#!download|159p6|92389917|baraha70.rar|4369|R~E29E0C285E017417CD42AB8064A78030|0|0
https://rapidshare.com/#!download|7p1|251659742|BARAHA_8.0.rar|4854|R~A7F9C128D400CED8431C4614FE33B68F|0|0
http://www.baraha.com/

• ITRANS 2003 transliteration-devanAgari editor can be downloaded here, but it has no Unicode support:
http://www.omkarananda-ashram.org/Sa...slator2003.htm

ITRANS 5.3 supports Unicode and can be downloaded here, but installation seems to be a problem/hassle:
http://www.aczoom.com/itrans/

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05. For fluent reading and writing, one should always seek texts in देवनागरी--devanAgarI rather than resort to transliterated text. Besides, writing in devanAgarI should be practised constantly, because only phonetical transliterations are used in typing Sanskrit using a computer, which cannot rivet the devanAgarI-lipiH in mind.

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