The Long Read · दीर्घपाठः
मित्रलाभः
The winning of friends — the first book of the Hitopadeśa
A crow watches a fowler spread his net. Before the twelve chapters are out, four animals who should have eaten one another are friends. This is a book, not a lesson: read a chapter, put it down, come back. The bookmark waits.
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About this text
This is a graded adaptation, not a critical edition. The Hitopadeśa's own prose is long-sentenced and full of compounds you meet in Level 4; these twelve chapters tell the same story inside the grammar the classes have already taught, so you can read them rather than decode them. Words new to the site are threaded into the Review Mālā as you close each chapter.
Ready for the real thing? Pāṭhaśālā
Four unadapted classical verses — Vālmīki, the Gītā, the Īśāvāsya Upaniṣad — with no grading at all.
← Contents
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◗)) hear it
Tap any word in the column and its meaning appears here, in the margin, so the line you are reading stays where it is. Tap ◗)) to hear a sentence and see what it says.
New in this chapter
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Closing the chapter
Three things close a chapter: you have heard it through, you have said it aloud yourself, and you can answer three questions about it — asked and answered in Sanskrit, because that is the whole point.
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Let it run once with your eyes on the page.
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Out loud, all the way through, mistakes and all.
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◗))
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Check it
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A vowel tapped after a consonant becomes its mātrā, the way it does in Dictation.
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Two tries gone — show me the answer
the answer
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Now write it yourself. Seeing it is not the same as producing it.