Find the Gap What tutoring taught me about learning Sanskrit

In college I tutored students with learning disabilities, for two years, in the classes I was taking such as Psychology and the Law to to Art History to Child’s Psychology. Many of the students I was working with had never earned an A. My job was to help them get one. Sometimes, they even scored higher than I did — I loved it.

I wasn't smarter than their professors. I was looking for something different. I was looking for the gap: the one missing piece that made everything after it slide off. And I was looking for what the student already knew. What excited them? What had they already explored deeply on their own? Whatever it was, that was the ground. I'd take the hard idea and set it down there, next to something they already owned, until the two belonged together.

That's how anyone learns anything. New knowledge needs somewhere to live.

I learned part of this from a book: The Memory Book, by Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas. Its lesson is context. You can use your own house as a memory system. Each room holds one part of what you're learning. You walk through the house and the knowledge is waiting in its rooms. Nothing floats. Everything has a place.

I also taught my students note cards, the same tool that taught me to read. So when I started Sanskrit, I did what I knew. I used brainscape thanks to Antonia Ruppel’s books and class at Yogic Studies. I memorized seven hundred words. I memorized the paradigms, every ending in its row.

And I couldn't break through.

I knew the words, but I didn't have the language. Every sentence was still a puzzle I had to take apart and turn back into English. The cards had no house. There was no room for the words to live in.

A child doesn't learn a language from cards. A child hears it, repeats it, and lives inside it. Stories do that. So I began writing stories that are a place. When the characters travel into the forest, the grammar travels with them. Vanāt, from the forest. Araṇye, in the deep forest. The case endings stop being a row in a table. They become where you are standing in the story, and that grounds them.

The other half was repetition, the kind that lasts years. Mantra practice, japa, is a single sound returned to again and again. Not for an hour or a week. For years. Something repeated that long stops being studied and becomes part of you. It happened with the words too. Somewhere along the way I stopped decoding. I see सिंही and it is a lioness. I don't break it into letters, and I don't translate it. The meaning is simply there. She shines.

That's what I want for anyone learning with these books. The Siṃhī stories are the house. The workbooks fill the gaps: each letter, each sound, each stroke. The flashcards on the Brainscape app and the recorded sounds at mateorose.com/sounds give you the repetition. None of it asks you to already be good at this. It asks you to start where you are, with what you already love, and come back tomorrow.

— Teo