Hare Krsna
Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada.
My name is Nityananda Dasa, a student of late Sri Gopiparanadhana Prabhu,
and for more than a decade a Sanskrit translator and editor for the BBT.
I have just released a very important online course – “Sanskrit
Pronunciation for ISKCON”.
It’s focus is correct pronunciation of all the standard ISKCON prayers that
are in Sanskrit. It is totally free of cost and is about 2.5 hours long,
which includes high-quality demo videos, in-depth tutorials on pronunciation
and singing of each prayer (from Sanskrit perspective), and downloadable
materials.
It is the first of its kind comprehensive video presentation on this topic –
user-friendly, easy to follow, and very visual. You can judge it for
yourself – here is the link for the whole course on
Youtube: https://bit.ly/3j7yBLU
Apart from just pronunciation, the course introduces devotees to
foundational Sanskrit chanting principles.
However, I do not possess the tools and wide scope of outreach to inform our
society at large about it – temples, congregations, etc.
So I approach you with the request to send out an announcement to the
worldwide devotee community about the course. I am convinced that thousands
of devotees could be benefited by having such an accessible material on the
topic at their fingertips.
More than just pronunciation of individual words, the cutting edge of this
course is that I teach the devotees how to retain the correct pronunciation
while singing with the beat – placement of syllables along the karatala
strokes, etc. This is crucial, as even if someone knows the right
articulation (specifically, long and short vowels, but not only limited to
that), it would always get diluted with the karatala beat, which takes over.
Living in India for already a third decade, I keenly observed how singers
who are learned in Sanskrit tackle this while they sing, and tried to
communicate this to the ISKCON audience by giving them the ready-made
solution for all the standard songs.
The full version of the course is published on my website –
www.sanskritsense.com, along with all the downloadable materials. There I
will engage in student discussions & Q/A as well (I won’t be doing it on
Youtube as much).
Hope to hear from you soon,
your humble servant, Nityananda Dasa
