How to Learn the Sanskrit Alphabet and 154 Core Words: A 204-Card Study Guide

Sanskrit is usually taught the slow way: a term of grammar before you are allowed near a real word. The Sanskrit: Alphabet & Basic Vocabulary deck on Flip It (deck code CM4122, 204 cards) takes the opposite route. Fifty cards give you the Devanagari script, and the remaining 154 give you the everyday vocabulary layer that sits underneath the Gita, the Upanishads and half the technical terms in yoga studios.

The script block: 50 cards, four groups

Thirteen independent vowels (अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ऋ ॠ ऌ ए ऐ ओ औ), the full 33-consonant grid in its traditional phonetic order — velar, palatal, retroflex, dental, labial, then the semivowels य र ल व and sibilants श ष स ह — and four diacritic marks. The cards are transliteration-first, so you are always writing the letter, never just recognising it.

What the 154 vocabulary cards actually cover

• Numbers 1-10: एक, द्वि, त्रि, चतुर्, पञ्च, षट्, सप्त, अष्ट, नव, दश
• Kinship and people: मातृ (mother), पितृ, भ्रातृ, स्वसृ, पुत्र, दुहितृ, नर, नारी, बालक, मित्र, गुरु, शिष्य, राजन्, राज्ञी, देव, देवी
• Nature and cosmos: जल, अग्नि, पृथ्वी, आकाश, वायु, सूर्य, चन्द्र, तारा, प्रकाश, अन्धकार, वृक्ष, पुष्प, फल, पर्वत, नदी, सागर, वन
• Body: शरीर, शिर, नेत्र, कर्ण, नासिका, मुख, जिह्वा, दन्त, हस्त, पाद, हृदय, मनस्
• The philosophical core: सत्य (truth), धर्म, कर्म, ज्ञान, प्रज्ञा, शान्ति, प्रेम, करुणा, आनन्द, सुख, दुःख, जीवन, मृत्यु
• Verbal roots (20 cards): अस्, गम्, आगम्, वद्, अद्, पा, दृश्, श्रु, ज्ञा, दा, कृ, सद्, स्था, स्वप्, बुध्, लिख्, पठ्, चिन्त्
• Pronouns, question words and particles: अहम्, त्वम्, वयम्, यूयम्, इदम्, तत्, कः, किम्, कुत्र, कदा, कथम्, च, वा, अपि, एव, सदा, अधुना, अत्र, तत्र, सर्व

Two things to fix before your first session

1. The deck teaches the vowel letters but not the vowel signs. You get अ आ इ as standalone characters, but no mātrā cards — the attached forms (का कि की कु के को) that account for almost every vowel you will ever meet inside a word. Add twelve cards yourself, one per mātrā on क, and do them straight after the consonant grid. Same for the three conjuncts you cannot read a page without: क्ष, ज्ञ, त्र.

2. The backs are stems and roots, not usable words. मातृ is the stem; you will never see it in a text, you will see माता. राजन् appears as राजा, मनस् as मनः. गम् is a root; the sentence form is गच्छति. This is a legitimate way to build a deck — stems are what dictionaries index — but write the nominative singular (or third-person present) in the hint field so you learn both at once.

Two cards are worth editing outright: "To take" is given as गृह्, but the root is ग्रह् — गृह is already in the deck as "house", so the typo teaches you a collision. And नव does double duty for "nine" and "new" (a real homograph, worth one merged card), while न appears twice, as "No" and as "Not". Suspend the second.

Studying another constructed or classical language? See our Esperanto study guide for the opposite case — a language with no exceptions at all.

Deck CM4122 is in the Flip It library at flip-it.app.