Customer Reviews

Learning Practical Tibetan

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I am only writing this review, as I feel the honourable person who gave this book one star was a little harsh. I learned spoken Tibetan from this book and I have since used it to teach many other people. I have found it to be very useful - I love the tapes, well-designed, well-arranged. Tons of useful vocab. If you know even half of what is in this book, then you can get by very comfortably with speaking Tibetan in Tibet. Sure, someone who wants to learn grammar might do better with something else, but for 'Practical Tibetan', this book is tops.

Don't let the title of this review fool you, this is a really good Tibetan book. It is full of vocab and set up really well for Westerners. It is great if you are wanting to learn simple Tibetan phrases. But as the title says, this is a 'practical' not a comprehensive language book. The Tibetan language is incredibly complex and difficult. If you are taking a trip to central Tibet and want to know the basics of the Tibetan language, don't leave home without this book. If you want to learn the foundations of Tibetan and really want to tackle the language try "Modern Tibetan Language" (vol I and II) by Losang Thonden published by the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala (make sure you get the tapes too!). If you are looking for a comprehensive system to learn conversational Tibetan, try the 4 volume, 18 tape "Fluent Tibetan" system published by Snow Lion. Good luck!

I first read a glowing review of this book from Columbia University and decided to buy it. It's a wonderful book in its own right and especially good when you purchase the accompanying tapes. I used the book when I was in Nepal with great success, and imagine my surprise when I saw many Tibetans with the same book! They told me it helped them to learn English. By far better than the confusing Goldstein alternative (lonely planet), I thanks the authors for filling a gap with such a worthy product.

This is a good phrase book ONLY if you can read and pronounce Tibetan script already... The transliterations have frequent outright errors, but in general are simply wrong. They have used their own imaginative system of transliteration, which is fine, but spoken Tibetan words is simply not pronounced this way. As ONE example, according to this book, no Tibetan word ever has a consanent on the end! PAR and PAL and PAG are all PA, apparently. While endings are often softened or clipped in Tibetan, the pronounciation you will get, using this book, will make Tibetans think you have a serious speech impediment. Simply useless to the average student.

This is a very useful book. It is basically a phrase book, but I also gives word-by-word translation, and so you know how the sentences are made. Tapes are also useful. It is very practical in outlook, and frankly it could have been better with theoretical description of sound and tone marks - those who don't care can just skip them.

Unless you get the audio forum set that has over 2 dozen tapes & several books, this book is the best thing to get you up to speed with Tibetan pronunciation and vocab. Very useful and user friendly, with lots of vocab and clear instruction, as the other reviewers have mentioned. With casual effort, you can make good use of the book, however the more time you put in with it, the more you will be rewarded in learning Tibetan.

The idiotic cover should've been the clue. This book attempts to be some sort of compromise between a phrase book (no time to learn the language, just tell me how to order something!) and a 'teach yourself' (grammar, pronunciation, etc.). As a phrase book, Goldstein's is superior. As a grammar, this work is a mess: The dative-locative (la dun) is called an 'accusative', the agentive (ergative-instrumental) is ignored, the tense system is blown up into an 'aspect' system (This isn't Chinese, kids), .... I could go on, but grammar bores people. Get Goldstein's phrasebook. It's not great but it's a) cheaper and b) more useful.

This is an unusual language book: a hybrid which combines the practical rudiments of Tibetan grammar with a useful vocabulary for getting around the country and interacting with local people. It certainly would be a must-have for anybody planning to visit and it is certainly more portable than most of its competitors.

My criticism of it is due to its skimpy treatment of the Tibetan writing system- although material is presented both in Tibetan script and transcription (a rather imprecise one) the Tibetan is useful only to a person literate in the language, because the Tibetan writing system is not phonetic. In addition to the 'root letter' and vowel of a syllable (the actual combination that actually gets enunciated), you can have prefices, superscripts, subscripts and up to two suffices. Some of these other letters indicate a change of tone, some of them actually are combined with the root letter, some are there to indicate that the word means something different from another word with the same sound, some of them do slightly modify the sound of the syllable and some of them just seem to be along for the ride, among other possibilities. So a learner cannot just learn the Tibetan alphabet and then figure out the pronunciations of syllables and words. There are other sources for that, of course- 'Fluent Tibetan' and 'Manual of Standard Tibetan' both cover this in all its exruciating detail.

Although there are some inaccuracies in this book, there are far fewer in number than in all the other Tibetan phrase books. This book is by far the best of the lot and will allow one to have some quite reasonable conversations with Tibetans.