What the classroom version left out
You learned it phonetically. A teacher or a grandparent moved their lips and you moved yours, syllable by syllable, until the sound lived in your body without the meaning living anywhere near it. The Gayatri mantra from Rigveda 3.62.10 is one of the most recited verses in the world, and most people who chant it daily could not tell you what the word dhee means, the word the entire mantra is built around.
