In my research of sound, grooves, and rhythms it won't be fair if I only talk about musical concepts of the West. Since my interests lie in both Western and Eastern sounds it was important for me to read literature of Eastern musicology. For whatever reason this gave me the idea to learn Sanskrit on top of the research that I am already doing. I have read a fair bit on the musicology of Indian classical music but the learning is far from over and since I want to dig deep into the literature, it gives me an opportunity to learn such an elegant classical language. Learning a new language has been on my to do list since a long time but I wasn't sure what language do I learn but getting into psychoacoustics and especially into Sitar gave me the perfect idea of that language being Sanskrit from where I start my linguistic journey.

I follow a few linguistics on Twitter and through one of them I happened to come across Dr. Antonia Ruppel a German linguist and a philologist who's main area of research is Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. On top of her research she also has online courses teaching introductory, intermediate, and advanced Sanskrit and Latin. The introductory Sanskrit 101 classes were about to begin in September just a few days before I came across a video of her talking about Laryngeals. It felt like the right time to grab this opportunity even if it might take a lot of time away from my primary sound research. So enrolled for Sanskrit 101 which lasted 3 months and each week a new topic was covered. The thing that I liked about the way Dr. Ruppel approaches teaching a new language is explaining the underlying systems of linguistics and grammar instead of just memorising a bunch of concepts and rules without understanding why those rules and concepts exist in the first place. Not to say that there is no memorising involved in learning a new language but understanding the underlying structure of grammatical composition helps make a solid mental model of how things work which makes memorising more logical and easy to remember.

Now that I have finished Sanskrit 101 I still lack understanding of some concepts and haven't really memorised a lot of concepts which I was supposed to. So, my plan here with these write-ups is to clear my mental model of the first 12 chapters from her book The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit which was the curriculum of her Sanskrit course. The write-ups here won't be mapped here 1 to 1 with the chapters but would be condensed into similar topics which may or may not end up being more than 12.
It would have been better to make these articles instantly when I was done with a week's material but unfortunately I could not plan it so I am doing it now that the introductory course has finished. I have already enrolled for 102 and hopefully will be able to make these writings weekly in that course for the new material that I learn.