Most lists of "first Sanskrit words" are glossaries. You read twenty words, you forget nineteen, and you are no closer to reading anything.
This one is arranged differently. Each word here demonstrates something about how Sanskrit works, a root, a prefix, a suffix, or a family relationship with English. By the end you should be able to see the machinery, which is the thing that makes vocabulary stop being memorisation.
And you will probably find you already know several of them.
Part one: nine words you already use
These have all been borrowed into English. What follows each is what it is actually made of, because in Sanskrit, almost nothing is arbitrary.
| नमस्ते namaste | Two words, not one: namaḥ (a bow, salutation) + te (to you). Your very first word is already a lesson in sandhi, the way Sanskrit fuses sounds where words meet. |
| योग yoga | From the root yuj, to join or yoke. It is the same ancient word as English yoke. Not "exercise": union. |
| गुरु guru | Its plain meaning is heavy. A teacher is called guru because they carry weight. Sanskrit does this constantly, abstract ideas resting on physical ones. |
| मन्त्र mantra | man (to think) + -tra, a suffix meaning "instrument for". An instrument of thought. That -tra ending turns up everywhere once you notice it. |
| कर्म karma | From kṛ, to do. It means action, no more and no less. Everything mystical attached to it in English came later. |
| धर्म dharma | From dhṛ, to hold or uphold. That which holds things together. Once you know the root, the range of meanings stops looking random. |
| अवतार avatāra | ava (down) + tṝ (to cross over). One who descends. Prefixes in Sanskrit work exactly like de-, trans- and sub- in English. |
| शान्ति śānti | From śam, to be calm, plus the suffix -ti which makes an abstract noun. Same mechanism as English -ness. |
| विद्या vidyā | From vid, to know: the same ancient root behind English wit and wisdom, and Latin video. Knowledge as seeing. |
Nine words, and already four pieces of machinery: roots, prefixes, suffixes, and sandhi. That is most of how Sanskrit builds anything.
Part two: eleven words that show the languages are related
Sanskrit and English are cousins. Both descend from a common ancestor linguists call Proto-Indo-European, which also produced Latin, Greek and Persian.
You can see it plainly:
| Sanskrit | Meaning | Its English relative |
|---|---|---|
| मातृ mātṛ | mother | mother, maternal |
| पितृ pitṛ | father | father, paternal |
| नाम nāma | name | name, nominal |
| त्रि tri | three | three, triple |
| द्वार dvāra | door | door |
| अग्नि agni | fire | ignite, igneous (via Latin ignis) |
| सर्प sarpa | snake | serpent |
| राजन् rājan | king | regal, royal (via Latin rex) |
| मृत mṛta | dead | mortal, mortuary |
| नव nava | new | new, novel |
| सत्य satya | truth | , from sat, "being"; compare essence |
One honest correction while we are here. You will often read that Sanskrit is "the mother of all languages". It is not, and the claim does the language no favours, Sanskrit is a sibling of Latin and Greek, not their parent. The real relationship is remarkable enough without inflating it.
Why this matters more than the words themselves
Look again at mantra and śānti. One is a root plus "instrument for". The other is a root plus "the quality of". Neither had to be memorised as a lump, each was assembled.
This is the single most encouraging true thing about Sanskrit: the vocabulary is built, not arbitrary. A few hundred roots, a set of prefixes, a set of suffixes, and thousands of words become derivable rather than memorisable.
Which is why, in a beginners' course, time spent on how words are made pays back far better than time spent on word lists. The lists run out. The machinery does not.
Where to go from twenty words
Learn the script sooner than feels comfortable. Devanagari is phonetic, one letter, one sound, no exceptions worth worrying about, and most people can read it haltingly within two or three weeks. Transliteration is a useful crutch that quietly hides distinctions the script makes obvious.
Say everything out loud. Sanskrit was an oral language for most of its life and it is built for the ear. Silent reading loses much of what makes it learnable.
Do not start with the Bhagavad Gītā. It is what everyone reaches for and it is genuinely difficult. Simple prose first, then verse.
If you want to go further
Our Sanskrit Foundations course takes an absolute beginner through the script, the roots and the grammar that this article only points at: 18 weeks, live, in small batches.
Taught in English, so no prior Hindi is assumed, by Ms. Ishita Parikh, MA (Acharya) in Sanskrit from Central Sanskrit University, and NPTEL Elite certification in Spoken Sanskrit from IIT Kharagpur, where she was one of 77 candidates certified nationwide. The first class is free.
Frequently asked questions
Can I learn Sanskrit without knowing Hindi?
Yes. Knowing Hindi helps with the script and with some vocabulary, but it is not a prerequisite and it is not an advantage in the grammar, Hindi grammar and Sanskrit grammar diverge quite sharply. Plenty of people begin Sanskrit with no Indian language at all, usually through yoga, chanting or philosophy. Our classes are taught entirely in English for exactly that reason.
Do I need to learn Devanagari to start Sanskrit?
Not on day one. Most beginners start with transliteration. Sanskrit written in Roman letters with diacritical marks, and pick up Devanagari in parallel over the first weeks. The script is genuinely quick to learn because it is phonetic: each letter makes one sound and each sound is written one way, with none of the irregularity English has. Waiting too long is the real mistake, because transliteration hides distinctions the script makes obvious.
Is Sanskrit related to English?
They are distant cousins rather than parent and child. Both descend from a common ancestor that linguists call Proto-Indo-European, which is also the source of Latin, Greek, Persian and most European languages. That shared ancestry is why Sanskrit mātṛ resembles mother, nāma resembles name, and trí resembles three. Sanskrit is not the origin of English, and claims that it is the mother of all languages are not supported, but the family relationship is real and it makes vocabulary noticeably easier.
How many Sanskrit words do I need to read simple texts?
Fewer than you would need in most languages, because Sanskrit words are built from a small set of roots. A few hundred roots plus the common prefixes and suffixes will let you work out the meaning of thousands of words you have never seen. That is why time spent on how words are constructed pays back far better than time spent memorising vocabulary lists.
Is Sanskrit hard to learn for an English speaker?
It is systematic rather than easy. The grammar is more elaborate than English, nouns change form according to their role, and there are three numbers rather than two, but it is exceptionally regular, so what you learn keeps working. Most English speakers find the first month the hardest, because the idea that a noun changes shape is unfamiliar. After that it becomes predictable in a way English never is.
Twenty down
You now know twenty Sanskrit words and, more usefully, four of the mechanisms that build them. That is a genuine start, and considerably more than most people have after a week of a language app.
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