[bhasi]

I wasn't referring to knowledge of the Paninian sutras or pratyayas, to be clear, when I said "the basics".

For this story, you don't need to know the pratyayas but you do need to know the tenses, the ktva-lyap forms, etc to fully understand what is going on. With only an incomplete knowledge of those aspects, one can sort of intuit the overall meaning but eventually would find that they had the wrong idea altogether when reading the corresponding translation in a language they know.