Thanks.

Himanshu

Thanks. It is obvious that you have well formed views on the learning of grammar. You should continue to engage with the site although the best option would be for you to join us on a weekly basis.

Many of the group are teachers (professors at universities) or PhD’s themselves so they can figure out for themselves such information as you point out; anyway balamanorama does give such information. Most people can and do read it on occasion. Having said that, it must be said that they tend to be busy with their research and writing commitments. We do emphasize memorizing sutras in our group but we don’t do it in class, given the weekly 1 hour slot that we have.

Your suggestions are useful regardless. Keep ‘em coming.

I have a suggestion regarding the layout of the suutra’s on the webpage. It would be good if you could identify the type for each suutra you quote and let the students maintain a list of the different types of samjna, vidhi and paribhasha suutras.

When I learnt Panini traditionally our guru used to identify each new suutra as one of the following seven types:

vidhi (operational)
samjna (syntactic word or convention)
paribhaashaa (metarules)
adhikaara (headings)
atidesha (extensions)
niyama(restriction)
nishedha (negation)

We would always have the samjna suutras handy and revise them regularly. This would fix the grammatical terminology in our head so when we would read the paribhaashaa or vidhi we were able to relate to the suutra immediately and easily.

Take for example: The vidhi suutra that Himanshu Pota referred to above - 217 सम्बुद्धौ च (7.3.106) could have been easily understood by him if he would have been revising the samjna suutras since he would have known the samjna suutra 132 ekavacanam sambuddhih - i.e. syntax term sambuddhi implies sambodhana and singular.

My guru would always emphasise the importance of knowing the samjna suutras thoroughly well. And I am sure this method will be useful to your students.

The other thing I thought I would share is a technique we used at the traditional school for commiting the suutras to memory. We would read the pada-paatha of each suutra and repeat it with the guru thrice, then with the class thrice and then by ourselves thrice. If we made a mistake then we would be corrected. After every 9 suutras we would revise the 9 suutras. This way we could learn the suutras very quickly.

I hope you find this information of some practical use.

Thanks
Kartik