Announcing The Pali Tutor

Learning to read Pali is something many students of Buddhism would like to do, but many are put off because initially it seems so difficult. Admittedly, it's a shallower learning curve if you've already,  at some time, studied Latin or another inflected language. I went through school so far back in the mists of time that Latin was still a compulsory subject in High School. Although I remembered almost nothing of it by the time I tried my hand at Pali, the idea of inflected nouns was not altogether foreign to me.

If you can cross that conceptual bridge, what remains is the donkey work involved in learning any language; the memorization of vocabulary, declensions and conjugations. Having suffered an injury that kept me from useful labour out of doors most of this spring and summer, I found something useful to do indoors and brushed up on my Javascript to carry out a project I've had percolating in my mind for some time.

The result is the Pali Tutor, an online application that lets the user do interactive memory drills for Pali vocabulary and declensions. I may add conjugations at some future time. If anyone finds this useful, drop me a line. Especially write to me if you find any mistakes or bugs.

This is actually my second iteration of this idea, the previous one done about a decade ago was in Hypertalk format, which is now obsolete. Computers are here to remind us of anicca.