deriv LSK ETT STT aSTA ALPH OLDHOMEPAGE NEWHOMEPAGE
Most Sanskrit books are printed in the devanAgarI देवनागरी script. It is used not only to write Sanskrit, but also to write Hindi, Nepalese, and a dozen or two other languages. You can learn it from books, tutorials and youtube videos. qq(see wikipedia on Devanagari).
Like all alphabets, /devanAgarI is long to learn. Do not expect to master it in a week. If you learn a letter a day, you are going fast enough, and you will finish in two or three months.
Using /devanAgarI for printed books is a modern custom, no more than two hundred years old. Sanskrit manuscripts were usually written in any local alphabet the writer was used to. I encourage my Bengali students to use Bengali alphabet to take Sanskrit notes if they are not yet used to reading and writing /devanAgarI.
The Bengali alphabet has a small problem: the same letter has to represent the Sanskrit sounds b ब् and v व् — which is not much of a problem because v व् is traditionally mispronounced as b ब् in Bengal. But I don't happen to have that sort of tolerance for regional quirks. So I tell my students to choose between (A) writing two dots under the v व्, so that pRthivI पृथिवी does not look like pRthibI पृथिबी (B) writing b ब् and v व् the same way, but memorize which b ब् letters sound like v व् and which sound like b ब्. Most of them choose (A).