SKT 201 | Intermediate Sanskrit I:
The Bhagavadgītā
9-Week Online Course
(May 23 - July 22, 2022)
with Dr. Antonia Ruppel
Enrollment will re-open in Spring 2023.
Cutting-edge online Sanskrit curriculum
Join renowned teacher Dr. Antonia M. Ruppel, and a global cohort of students, for this unique opportunity to study and receive world-class training in Classical Sanskrit—from the comfort of your own home.
"Dr. Ruppel is without a doubt one of the finest teachers I've ever encountered, in any subject. SKT 101 was superbly organized and I'm immensely grateful for the ease of use and especially the recordings which allowed me to attend classes I otherwise could not have done."
– Jeffrey Kahane
PhD Student in Classics, USC
Intermediate Sanskrit
This course builds on our foundational Elementary Sanskrit program and provides students the opportunity to reinforce the principles of Sanskrit grammar, build vocabulary, and gain more confidence through reading original Sanskrit texts.
In our Elementary Sanskrit classes we got to know most Sanskrit noun and verb forms and some rules of Sanskrit syntax. We often have a general familiarity with them—but they haven’t settled in our brains yet. The best way to help with that settling is to read lots of actual Sanskrit and thus to constantly remind ourselves of the things we know (or once knew and have forgotten in the meantime, because we are human and Sanskrit is hard).
The second thing we need to be able to read Sanskrit is a larger vocabulary. Introductory Sanskrit classes often keep low the amount of vocabulary you are required to learn, because just making you memorize all those noun and verb forms is more than enough. And so you will now be provided with a list of frequent words, we will talk about vocab learning strategies in our first class, you will get online flash cards for all the words, and will be offered regular quizzes to test your progress.
Note: Students who have not taken our SKT 100-level courses are welcome to join, so long as you have sufficient background in the language.
Reading the Gītā in Sanskrit
Of course, in SKT 201 we are not just reading any text, but the Bhagavadgītā, the "Song of the Lord" itself. Countless have read it before us, countless have been inspired by it, and the text has been interpreted it in a wide variety of ways. Our aim in this course will be to remain fairly literal and to see what the text says—what we can translate—where it remains ambiguous, and how that ambiguity comes about. That way, every course participant will have a basis for their own informed view of the text.
In particular this term we will be focusing on the Sāṅkhya-Yoga passages of Chapters 4-6.
Course Structure
Live Zoom Class Sessions for SKT 201 (90 min)
May 23 - July 22, 2022
Mondays @ 12-1:30pm Pacific
Wednesdays @ 10-11:30am Pacific
*ALL LIVE SESSIONS WILL TAKE PLACE VIA ZOOM, AND WILL BE RECORDED FOR LATER VIEWING.
Each SKT 200-level course offers students:
- 18 Zoom live class sessions + recordings (90 min each)
- 5 YSACP Credits
- Up to 27 Hours of CE credit with YA
- Yogic Studies Certificate upon completion (PDF)
- Access to the private Yogic Studies Online Community Forum
Your Instructor
Dr. Antonia M. Ruppel
Lecturer in Sanskrit, Institute of Indology and Tibetology, LMU, Munich, Germany
Antonia Ruppel is a Classicist by training who came to Sanskrit through a series of fortunate accidents. She learnt the language as an autodidact, and one of her reasons for writing her textbook, The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit (2017), was to make the experience of studying Sanskrit easier and more pleasant for others. She has recently published the followup volume, An Introductory Sanskrit Reader: Improving Reading Fluency (2021), designed to help students gain reading fluency in an enjoyable and straightforward way.
Language pedagogy is at the heart of her life. She has been teaching Sanskrit for 15 years at universities such as Cornell, Oxford and now the LMU in Munich, Germany, as well as offering courses in variety of formats online.
Listen to our interview with Dr. Ruppel on the Yogic Studies Podcast.
Three 9-week terms
-
SKT 201 | Intermediate Sanskrit I:
The Bhagavadgītā (May 23 - July 22, 2022) -
SKT 202 | Intermediate Sanskrit II:
The Rāmāyaṇa (Sept 5 - Nov 18, 2022) -
SKT 203 | Intermediate Sanskrit III: Sanskrit Narratives: Echoes of the Bṛhatkathā (Jan 9 - Mar 10, 2022)
Enrollment is closed.
Bundle Tuition
$700
ONE-TIME PAYMENT
• Lifetime access to SKT 201, 202, and 203.
• Save $200 by enrolling in all three terms up front!
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes! Students should have the equivalent of 1-year of academic Sanskrit or close-to.
If you're new to Sanskrit and want to study the Gītā with us in English translation, please check out the course YS 202.
If you'd like to begin learning Sanskrit, please see our Elementary Sanskrit I course.
Not to worry! All live sessions with Dr. Ruppel will be recorded and posted to the course website within 24 hours. Students will have lifetime access to them.
So while live attendance is strongly encouraged to get the most out of the course, you can still participate by watching the recordings.
You are also encouraged to participate in the online Community forum, and have the opportunity to send questions in ahead of time, especially if you cannot attend live.
No, not at all. You are welcome to only register for a single course/term, as it suits your interests and level of study.
For the Intermediate level courses, students will be provided with PDF copies of the text selections we will be reading.
However, students will also be reviewing grammar and other topics using The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit (Cambridge University Press, 2017), written by our instructor, Dr. Antonia M. Ruppel herself!
If you don't own this already, we strongly encourage you to pick up a copy prior to the start of the course.
Unfortunately, SKT 100-level and 200-level courses are the only courses that are NOT included in the YS Membership Program. The reason behind this is we need to open/close enrollment at set dates and create unique Sanskrit cohorts to better serve the learning environment for both instructor and students.
However, both SKT 100a | The Devanāgarī Seminar and SKT 100b | Sanskrit for Yogis are available to students in the YS Membership Program.
Yes! Upon completion of each SKT course in the series, you will be eligible for an official Yogic Studies certificate of completion.
Each course also earns you 5 credits towards the Yogic Studies Advanced Certificate Program (YSACP).
If you have any further questions about this course or our Sanskrit curriculum, please email us at [email protected]
"Antonia Ruppel is just such a great teacher: An expert but also fully engaged with the class in an enthusiastic, pleasant, helpful manner. Added to this are the wonderfully diverse questions and perspectives of the students and the joy of reading carefully cultural classics like the Bhagavad Gita. I will take another course, for sure. "
Patricia Dold
Associate Professor, Religious Studies, Memorial University, St. John's Newfoundland, Canada
"Sanskrit is tough. Really tough. This course makes it possible to slowly and systematically tackle it and start making sense of it, and that is an incredibly rewarding thing. Antonia is an outstanding and unfailingly positive teacher, and is also rather funny, which of course adds to the value of the course enormously."
SKT 201 Student
2021
"Dr. Antonia Ruppel’s Sanskrit courses bring to the language and its literature a thorough and linguistically well informed pedagogical approach that finally makes the great cultural and religious heritage of India accessible to students who may not have had training in Classical philology or even nowadays in the formal grammar of their own native language."
Dr. Robert Sinkewicz
Professor Emeritus, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto
"The Sanskrit series are a great introduction to the language, delivered in fresh and plain English by Dr. Antonia Ruppel. Her book is a fantastic resource and I see myself using it always to help navigate my interests in the language. She is an accessible teacher, always generous with her time and knowledge."
