Kurt SchmidtPali - Buddha's Language: A complete teach yourself course for beginners in 10 simple lessons

This great little book is an excellent way to start a study of Pali. The text book itself is a translation of a German textbook by Kurt Schmidt, a well regarded Pali to German translator.A BIG PLUS is an associated website [...] with sound files of the sections of Pali text in the lessons. The form of this course has similarities to Rune Johansson's excellent classic 'Pali Buddhist Texts'- but that book will cost you $50 to $60 and not have sound files. Another strength is the encouragement to memorise the short blocks of Pali text; which start with verses. This is a good way to go to help get Pali under your skin, and goes a little way to make up for the disadvantage of Pali being a largely textual language, which makes the 'immersion' in spoken language often used in learning languages a little difficult!Even if you only do a few lessons it will break the spell of the unfamiliar and lead to you being able to pronounce Pali a little better and not glazing over when you see a Pali word.Every human skill from gardening to music to driving a car has some specialised 'technical' language, it's unavoidable. Even with the best translations in the world there is still a place for knowing a little Pali if you are engaged in the human adventure of learning to Wake Up as recommended by the Buddha. This book can help open a whole new world of understanding Buddha Vacana - the Word of The Buddha.CheersJohn from Australia

This book is a good start but it's obvious there was no editing done and the author is not a writer. Many grammatical errors in English and misspellings in Pali. The vocabulary is not complete and explanations are sparse. It's seems like he tried to get it done too fast or English is not his native tongue, either way it needed to be edited. Had more time been put into the compiling of this book, it would actually be a good single beginning, however I have chosen not to use this as my main entry to Pali and find A New Course in Reading Pali to be much more in-depth and informative.This book is fine for a supplemental reference. A Pali Primer is also very well written and introduces the grammar at a controlled pace, it does not jump right into the Suttas but teaches the basic grammar breakdown through simple sentences.

I'm very happy with this book. I'm trying to learn some of the Pali language and this has been very helpful.

The book is 140 pages alright, but the one I received is actually 311 pages long! Apparently a book titled "Looking For Answers Through Dirty Glasses: Finding the Divine in a Challenging World" with 171 pages are embedded inside this book. I thought it was publishing mistake but doesn't seem so by looking at the side of the book.

It is very clear and easy to understand.

Kurt Schmidt's little handbook could have been a good and useful introduction to Pali for those who don't want to study the language in great depth (for that, turn to A.K. Warder's textbook, which is far more thorough).BUT it has some really damaging faults. It is riddled with crass typos and errors - a new, corrected edition is urgently needed. The vocabulary lists in each lesson are incomplete, and the vocabulary section at the end of the book is a joke, it has only a feeble subset of the words used throughout the book.These faults mean that the information presented in this book cannot be trusted, and it is necessary to check every detail from a more reliable source, which is tedious and excessively time-consuming.I am surprised that such a shoddy product has been published.

If you're looking for a good introduction to Pali, then this is it. Check out the support resources at (...) as these are very useful. Pali is highly inflected, but if you're even thinking about studying it, then you're probably familiar with the grammatical complexities of gender, declension, conjugation, and so on. Familiarity with e.g. Latin case structure will help, although Pali is a shade more complex. If this stuff is all Greek to you, then the book (plus lucid website articles) provides a sound, plain and clear introduction to the essentials of grammar. One of the strengths of the approach is its realistic and uncompromising approach to rote learning where necessary: if you want to master Pali, there is sound advice here on how to do it properly. Parroting promotes proficient Pali.Work through Schmidt's introduction, and you're well-placed to move on to, say, Warder's standard university-level introduction (avoid the latest BKP edition: go for the 3rd/Pali Text Society instead) - which the text cites. You'll find plenty of good support resources online, including free dictionaries and grammars, but do shop around with care, checking reviews and editions assiduously, as there is some poor-quality material out there, too.A common complaint around both Pali and Sanskrit primers is poor textual accuracy. Schmidt's Pali is spot-on, but the principal weakness of his text is the quality of the English. You just have to get past this, as Schmidt himself is a reliable guide, but it seems quite bizarre that the revised and updated 2nd edition of a popular introduction to Pali should still include such a high level of gross error in English spelling, grammar and usage. My favourite example is p22, where "oder" is used for "or" - and here's the clue. I am confident that this text is entirely lucid in the original German, but the translation into English is weak. The dedication thanks "John Allan and Jayarava for their valuable feedback and corrections" - this can only be read ironically. Any competent English-speaker off the street, even a child, could quickly and substantially correct and improve the text; maybe the publishers will take the trouble to hire one for the 3rd edition?Amazon's Kurt Schmidt page is here: (...)

Thanks for a great buy

日本には、パーリ語のいい文法書と辞書が残念ながら存在しない。この本はコンパクトで、これ１冊あれば、パーリ語とは何かを短期間で理解できる。まずこの１冊をマスターし、次のステップに進めばいい。　この本は英文で書かれているが、やさしい英文なので、そんなに苦労はいらないだろう。