Lama David Curtis: The Tibetan Alphabet 

One feature of Tibetan language is that there are many single alphabet becomes a word eg ཁ་ (kha) Mouth ང་། (nga) Me ཆ་ (Cha) Pair ཇ་ (Ja) Tea ཉ་ (nya) Fish ད་ (Dha) Now ཕ་ (Pha) Father བ་ (Bha) Cattle མ་ (Ma) Mother ཟ་ (Za) Eat ལ་ (La) Passes (Mountain passes) ཤ་ (Sha) Meat ས་ (Sa) Earth, Ground, Land

I am seeing a Westerner teaching Tibetan for the first time. It is funny in good sense. I met a Westerner experienced thangka painter many years ago.

thank you from a tibetan for teaching tibetan to foriegners and chinese want to destroy our culture and langauge and even tibetan from tibet

I am tibetian speaker from pakistan but I dont know how to write the tibetian script... Your videos are helpful keep uploading

Found this in youtube today only.Amazing explanation. If I was taught like this ,i would be expert in tibetan.Highly appreciated.

grateful both for this introduction to The Tibetan Alphabet and for the flashcards offered by David Curtis and Tibetan Language Institute.

You are a very good teacher! Thank you so much for making Tibetan easier to learn.

This is sooo similar to Indian Hindi... I am learning tibetan the old fation way from my Tibetan friends father... I love it... I have bigger plans...

you’re a great teacher! i know this is an old video but I hope you post more tibetan teaching videos! 💞

Tashi dele Professor...You awesome, Namaste

I like Tebetan culture

I know from listening to other Tibetans that you're right, but it's REALLY hard for most English speakers to pronounce (and even hear) aspirated consonants because they don't form contrasting phoneme pairs in English. (i.e. "top" is aspirated T and "stop" is not; but there is no "top" vs. "t(h)op", so we never had to learn to hear or say the difference). So if this guy doesn't over-pronounce the second column, I would have a hard time even hearing any different at all.

The previous comment by Lobsang Tenje about pronunciation misses the point. Ninety percent of the Tibetan Buddhist canon is not translated into English; therefore, learning to READ Tibetan is of primary importance. Conversational Tibetan is not the aim. Additionally, of the translated material available, Dharma students find themselves at the mercy of the translator's opinions, judgments and cultural understanding, both his or her own, as well as that which is being interpreted.

I did like this video, but not the sudden interruption at 7:41.

Thank you very much!

i want to say with firm confidence and with long research,that the Tibetan as a writing is predominantly extracted from Sanskrit though modified so as to emerge itself variant. Yet the phonetics when we speak,the spoken language is different to every other languages apart from the ancient middle Chinese. So is the case of cultural exchanges with the Chinese empires,that many loan words from the middle Chinese is frequently observed. For example, "tsong" (onion) in Tibetan as "cong","chokze"(table) is "zhouze" that is pronounced as "trokze","chuu"(water) is "shui" and likewise the numerals are very similar. Though we don't write the characters as middle Chinese, the phonetics is closely related.

WOW! THANKS, ❤️🖤💚🤎 FAMILY DAPHNE COTTON ALWAYS 💜,

Lama David's objective is not oral communication in any of the many, many dialects and regional variations of Tibet (one per valley?), but ability to make progress reading literary Tibetan. Lobsang may criticize, but many many Westerners have made enough progress with Lama David to quickly adjust to 3-year retreats conducted entirely in Tibetan. Given the vast support for Tibet generated by activities like David's, maybe Lobsang and his ilk will be less eager to criticize next time.

Thank you very much.

Thu Jay Chay

Oh My God .......its pronunciation is very similar to HINDI......soft sound.....I love it.

GREAT JOB.... IT WILL HELP TO MANY WHO WISH TO LEARN.

Good sir ,from cambodia

Learned Hindi first, then looking at this, sounds really similar

3:01 - segunda linha 6:13 - 7° linha 2 primeiras tem tom médio. E as duas últimas tem tom forte 6:22 - 2 últimas letras da 7° linha

So in essence, Tibetan is also a tonal language, but has fewer tones and different letters for different tones. A smart way to tackle the tonal issue. If Chinese language and its southern neighbours also approach the tonal issue in this technique, they would have so many letters. But there would still be fewer letters than the number of Chinese characters?

this is great, thank you for sharing this.

Check out our Tibetan Language Institute website at www.tibetanlanguage.org . There are a lot of free pdfs to print out, helpful links for self-paced study, and more. Also many videos at my RU-vid channel: Tibetan words explained word-by-word--Refuge & Bodhicitta Prayer, Dedication Prayer, verses from the 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva, and much more.

@LocaMoca1212 Tibetan. however, due to Chinese immigration into the now occupied Tibet, Mandarin is the lingua franca of the region. By the time you go, you'll need to know Mandarin Chinese, as opposed to Tibetan.

DAVID IT IS Paul HI BUD JUST SUBBED AND LIKED AND HIT THE BELL FOR UPDATES

I think it would be advisable to write the Devenagari equivalent as a substitute to denote the sounds :)

I love them. Thank for this class, I hope to learn :)

བཀའ་དྲིན་ཆེ།

hey who's the guitarist at the end ?? sounds great.

Excellent, same way I learned sanskrit.

Thank you so much!!!

Can someone translate "ba ki sa ba na la da " ? It is written on weapon and I cannot find out what it is.

where can i find a free online tibetan translator?

Everything ends on ah?

THANKS!

There's no schools in Brazil at which one can learn such languages.

It seems like the low tone (3rd column in each set) is always accompanied by a voicing of the respective phoneme. Why is this? Is it true that in Tibetan there are no short high vocables initiated by voiced consonants and vice versa? Also noticed the same thing with the 2nd column. Is it the case that aspirated consonants must be followed by a "medium" tone and that a "medium" tone vowel can only be initiated by an aspirated consonant?

A have read very different for the sixth row. Than you.

Beginner here, I have some questions about pronunciation... I have "Fluent Tibetan Fluent Tibetan: A Proficiency Oriented Learning System" And the first and third column sounds sound and look reversed. I.E. ཀ = ga and ག = ka, and the recordings on the tape sound like this as well..... I'm confused. Two questions. Is this just an older way of transcribing the letters? And two, Is ཀ actually closer to "ga" in pronunciation it is generally transcribed as "ka"? help please.

thanks

What about ༄༅།། and flipped letters like ཌ, ྀཊ,ཎ and stacked consonants like ྷད, ྲག , and how to know which consonants to and not to pronounce?

Shouldn't 'ར' be pronounced as an alveolar trill [r] in emphatic speech? Or, at least, shouldn't the all-too-American labialized retroflex approximant [ɻʷ] be avoided in favor of the trill [r] or the alveolar approximant [ɹ]?

Good job

What is the difference between 2nd row and 5th?

Seems that the low-toned consonant are all voiced consonants.

i can't differentiate za and dza

thank you :)

Does anyone know how to say "I praise them" In Tibetan? I'm trying to understand sentence structure and direct objects.

hello #DavidCurtis

@superwax123 same with Nepali, they are all derived from Sanskrit ;D

Is the any book for practicing?

Hi, great video! I was wondering if anyone can help me... is there a Tibetan word for "happiness" "joy" or "bliss" ?? If anyone knows how to pronounce & write this in Tibetan, please respond! Thank you :-)

this guy is really good at explaining...but the only problem is that he doesn't know how to pronounce the 4th letter "nga"...

@BestHwanHee Tashi Delek?

Tibetan alphabet is read like Karen people in Burma. They sound the same. Amazing!!!

Tha Zambuling Ghawa Lab Rie,Inze Karpo dumthu bhoyig zang Gue.-----------------Any way great.

Good points, slightly messy pronunciation. I suggest listening to these videos for basic knowledge and then moving to a native Tibetan speaker's pronunciation video.

mm-mm. Your tones change and it's confusing ;D But the information is still good enough for me.

Their alphabet is maybe derived in Hindu alphabet because of it's significant stroke

Teaching method is pretty good but pronunciation is totally wrong and incorrect sound . better stop teaching Tibetan.

@LocaMoca1212 In Tibet, the official language is Tibetan and that is the language principally used in the schools. More people in Tibet can read and write now in the Tibetan language than when the Dalai Lama ruled the country, thanks to the Chinese revolution. Schools for children were almost non-existent 50 years ago and higher education was not encouraged for the common people. Tibet is free now. The Chinese abolished slavery. There even more monasteries in Tibet now than ever.

are tibetan and mongolian related?

Continued: One needs only recall different versions of the Bible to know that much can be lost in translation. An inquisitive student will find it illuminating to read the original texts. Consider Latin study. What teacher pronounces it correctly? None of them. We don't know how it sounded. No one has suggested Latin scholars quit teaching because of improper pronunciation. That would be nonsense. The same holds true for the previous poster's suggestion. It's nonsense.

Most Asian languages have the same pattern

Third is ga not gha

woow its really cool however there is some mispronounciation eg its gha instead of ga overall impressive =)

Devnagari script is scientific and useful for computer.Inventer name was Paandini.who was hindu

Sujan sure it is cause Tibetan Language was formed from SANSKRIT except some few alphabets (^_^)

Isn't it zhongkha??

it's a devnagari script like Sanskrit panjaabi,Bengali,Nepali,Marathi,Gujarati,all are devnagari little bit defference only.devnagari is Hindus script which was invent in pesawar 6000 yrs. ago.