Sanskrit - Level 2

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2 Comments

Comment by Center for Bhakti Studies on July 23, 2008 at 2:21pm

Hare Krishna. Dandvats Prabhuji:
Thanks for your kind comments below. I have read them very carefully.
1. what software you use to converst .wmv to .mpg or .mp4? Can WIndows Media Player play these files?
2. We are already using Unicode. But some of our lessons are from previous year when we were not using unicode. I agree Unicode is the way forward.
3. WHat is your email id?

Regards
Achyuta Krishna dasa
igvt.hbg@gmail.com

Comment by bdsatish on June 19, 2008 at 11:05am

Hare Krishna. Let me introduce myself. I'm Satish from Bangalore, India. I came across this beautiful course only recently. Since I already knew Devanagari alphabet (the same one used for Hindi, which I learnt in school), Sanskrit Course Level-1 was easy to finish.

I have some suggestions for Level-2:
[1] The .wmv files are very large. I can help them convert to MP4 or .mpg video which works on all operating systems and occupies 25% size of original video. In India, ppl (like me) still use 56 kbps dial-up connections. Downloading even 10 MB takes nearly 45 minutes.

[2] The Balaram fonts are unnecessary, I feel. We can use the universal Unicode standard and encode Devanagari / Roman transliteration in UTF-8 format. There are very good advantages:
(a) People can read Sanskrit from their web browsers, without the need to install any font (let alone Balaram). It works with HTML, MS-WORD or any word processing software, out-of-the box.
(b) The Sanskrit lessons will be searchable on Internet (via say, Google). If you use Balaram fonts, the webpage/ word document will be mis-interpreted by search engines. All characters appear to be junk.

I also have computer programs which automatically do the conversion, in case of existing documents. Please give me a chance to use latest technology in the service of the Lord.

Now coming to the Level-1 course. I spent many hours downloading the lessons and still reading the Wikner.pdf file. I went through the video lessons and must ACK that all of them were very well designed. I had some doubts regarding pronunciation of sha and ssha, which is clarified now. Using MS-PAINT is a novel approach which I came across for first time here.

Thank you very much ( dhanyavaadaaH )

हरे कृष्ण हरे कृष्ण कृष्ण कृष्ण हरे हरे |
हरे राम हरे राम राम राम हरे हरे ||