For one reason or another, I started learning sanskrit this week.
I use an online language platform called Italki. It’s basically a place where you can find teachers and organise classes online. It’s where I also found my Bengali teacher too.
I took a chance and went with a teacher who was a lot older. His profile said he had taught in Sanskrit for over forty years. It was a slightly chaotic profile, far from the slicker, more polished video presentation you get from others.
I’ve had two classes with this teacher so far. His teaching method goes against most rules around modern western education pedagogy.
He did not ask me my motivations, he did not engage in small talk to get to know each other. He did not ask me about my other languages or why I was interested. He also did not set out some big learning goal or lesson plan.
Instead, we went through words in sanskrit. He would read them out loud, and then tell me the English of them. He would repeat the words several times. Over the course of the lesson, he slowly expanded to examples of different genders and plural conjugations. Each time, he would give example of words, repeating them several times.
On the face of it, this would seem like a banal way of learning. There were no flashy powerpoints or innovative gadgets used. Instead, it was just reading a scanned hand-written document.
Yet I left feeling satisfied after each class. It was fairly intense and tiring work. It was slower paced, allowing me to really digest the information displayed in front of me. After all my brain is in overdrive recognising a new alphabet, phonetics and vocabulary.
To the untrained eye, it might seem that teaching off a PDF document was unsophisticated. But when you look closely, there is a deepened mastery at work.
Most teachers are impatient. Watching people struggle with basic things can be frustrating. When we’ve ridden a bike for decades, we forget how long it took us to learn to do it at the beginning. The skill to teach slowly is an art that has been lost, particularly in the West.
I can’t help but compare it to the recent experience of learning Dutch. I had a teacher who was knowledgeable, but over time I realised I didn’t particularly enjoy her style. She would get me to speak, but then jump on the grammar mistakes I was making. When we did go through the grammar lessons, the exercises she would give combined it with unknown vocabulary and past grammar lessons too.
The experience was overwhelming. This was just too much to process all in one go. It was not kind on my mind, which has already been restructuring itself during my burnout. I came to dread having my classes, even though it was me who signed up to do them. I felt a lot of silent judgement for repeating mistakes, and an unneeded sense of pressure.
The funny thing is that on paper the Dutch teacher did the things to avoid this. She asked me how I was at the beginning of the class, made certain subjects relative to me and asked whether I wanted homework.
But these things felt more tick box. In the west, it’s almost like we learn an internal checklist of things to do ‘be nice, cordial, then down to business, then nice at the end’. At times, it can feel more inhuman rather than less.
My sanskrit teacher did none of these things. Yet I feel already that he has a much better understanding of me than my dutch teacher did after over 6 months of lessons.
The big difference was that he observed. He didn’t need to ask me my motivations, because my attentiveness within the class demonstrated it. At the end of the first class he told me that it was evident that I was properly paying attention and listening deeply to what he was saying. He was reading my energy, rather than my words.
A lot of people see this as too ‘woo-woo’ for them because it is not scientific enough. Yet the scientific actually often backs up the traditional far more than we realise.
After the class, I looked up the best ways to learn a new alphabet. And guess what? The suggested method was to repeat simple words rather than trying to memorise individual symbols. This would activate my brain through visual, listening and cognitive understanding in one go. Precisely the method that my teacher was using.
Such an approach comes from experience, in the case of my teacher, 40 years of it. A large part of scientific proof is literally seeing what stands the test of time. If something has worked for a long period, there’s probably a good reason as to why.
The truth with language learning is that it requires a lot of hard work. No flashy gadgets can get passed the fact that much of it comes through mundane repetition. Old school methods are less shy about this reality compared to newer ones.
It’s what has attracted me to learn sanskrit in the first place. In my quest for many answers, I’ve found fruit from ancient texts.
These texts not because of some sort of divine, but because they have accumulated thousands of years of experience before them. The quality of them were also good enough to last several thousands years more. This is in stark contrast to the other 98% of information I read, which will likely get forgotten after a week.
When dealing with the complexities of a chaotic, modern world, sometimes it serves to look at what worked in the past.