Anuradha Choudry - Why does my child do Sanskrit?

Anuradha Choudry

• Rutger Kortenhorst, a Sanskrit teacher in John Scottus School in Dublin, speaks on the value of teaching Sanskrit to children, based on his own experience with the language.
• My bet is that at the end of the hour you will all have come to the conclusion that your children are indeed fortunate that this extraordinary subject is part of their curriculum.
• But first of all: why Sanskrit? To answer that we need to look at the qualities of Sanskrit. Sanskrit stands out above all other languages for its beauty of sound, precision in pronunciation and reliability as well as thoroughness in every aspect of its structure. This is why it has never fundamentally changed unlike all other languages. It has had no need to change being the most perfect language of Mankind.
• The precision of Sanskrit stems from the unparalleled detail on how the actual sounds of the alphabet are structured and defined. The sounds have a particular place in the mouth, nose and throat that can be defined and will never change. This is why in Sanskrit the letters are called the ‘Indestructibles’ [aksharáni].
• The qualities of Sanskrit will become the qualities of your child- that is the mind and heart of your child will become beautiful, precise and reliable.
• By studying Sanskrit, other languages can be learnt more easily; this being the language all others borrow from fractionally. The Sanskrit grammar is reflected in part in Irish or Greek, Latin or English. They all have a part of the complete Sanskrit grammar.
• This is how I would summarize the principles for teaching Sanskrit as we carry it out at present: 1. Language learning is not for academics as everyone learns to speak a language from an early age before they can read and write and know what an academic is. So why insist in teaching Sanskrit academically? 2. The writing script is not the most fundamental thing to be taught. A language is firstly made of its sounds, words and spoken sentences. [The script we use -though very beautiful- is only a few hundred years old.] 3. Always go from what is known to what is new. 4.  Understanding works better than memorisation in this Age. Learning by heart should only take up 10 percent of the mental work, rather than the 90 percent rote learning in Sanskrit up to the recent present. 5. Don’t teach words and endings in isolation; teach them in the context of a sentence as the sentence is the smallest meaningful unit in language. 6. Any tedious memory work which cannot be avoided should be taught in a song. 7. Do not teach grammatical terms. Just as we don’t need to know about the carburetor, when we learn to drive a car. 8. The course should be finished in two years by an average student according to Narendra. This may be a little optimistic given that we are a little out of the loop not living in India, which is still Sanskrit’s custodian. At present I would say it is going to be a three-year course. 9. Language learning must be playful. Use drama, song, computer games and other tricks to make learning enjoyable.
• Rutger Kortenhorst, a Sanskrit teacher in John Scottus School in Dublin, speaks on the value of teaching Sanskrit to children, based on his own experience with the language.