I really like Tibetan people!

Early in my life, I was surrounded by many different language speakers, including Tibetans. My mother valiantly and determinedly managed to become an interpreter of Geshes who were teaching from Classical Tibetan Buddhist texts. I set myself the challenge of learning the colloquial language first, which she continued to struggle with, not having many immersion opportunities. So I have been trying to learn Tibetan for a very long time, but materials for learning that have an easy interlinear translation to support understanding the inner workings of Tibetan had proven impossible for me to find. As a result, I started making them for myself.

I was helped greatly by Tsetan Chonjore's book on Lhasa Tibetan to understand the functioning of "to be" in Tibetan, and this was supplemented by Franziska Oertle's excellent continuation of that revelation. It was enough to get me started with stubbornly trying to work out the actual meaning of the words in the many phrasebooks that I had collected. The THDL translation tool has also been an invaluable friend in this work, now joined by the Tibetan Dictionary by Phurba that I use on my iPhone.

In early March 2022, I was asked a question about pronouncing Tibetan, and thus began my adventure with YouTube. I supposed that many more people might have a similar struggle even just getting started with pronouncing the many prayers that they read along with at ceremonies in Buddhist Temples. And subsequent videos allowed me to explain the things that I was fairly sure of that might help beginners.

In mid-2023, I think it was, I had a further breakthrough when I realized that my interlinear translations would be much easier to maneuver if I started using the "-ing" form of verbs instead of the tense-based forms. Knowing that so many well-meaning translations and phrasebooks would relate "I , Mary being" as "I am Mary", or, "My name is Mary",  I decided to revise my earlier interlinear translations with this new perspective in mind, in the hopes of benefitting many of my beginner students and fellow lovers of Tibetan language.

My goal in providing these "-ing"-style learning materials is to enable meaningful communication that doesn't take learners years of frustration to unpack, and allow for a lively conversation to take place between Tibetans and foreigners that I believe has felt sadly inaccessible for many. I wrote Grammar and Sentence Structure articles about these that you can have a look at. A good example of my using it fully is the YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMdkROUoPtk&list=PLetUaJh0l0aQZa5S1wfqIaQi7mp-_Wu7j 

I truly hope that you are encouraged to gradually let the beauty of Tibetan communication enrich your life and your practice.

ManjuTib

2025-05-01: cleaned up the navigation at this website to favour readability on a mobile phone, since that seems to be how most of my viewers watch the videos...

2025-04-16: cleaning up the existing OCR of the Handbook of Colloquial Tibetan from 1897 https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.31488/page/n1/mode/2up 

2025-04-12 update: posted eight videos using the kindergarten slides from the CTA weekend school educational materials.

2025-04-08 update: created the psychological strategies and reflection articles using an initial draft requested from ChatGPT. 

Discovered (again thanks to ChatGPT) the pdffiller.com annotation tool, which I will use for making interlinear notes on pdf files such as the CTA books, since Adobe does not allow me to type in Tibetan on pdf documents.

Spelling practice page - typed version of the Tibetan Primer of Current Hand Writing with plans to finalize it and then add interlinear translation.

Evolution of the first few pages of the textbook in progress at the Translation practice exercises page with plans to keep adding dialogues and notes there over time. I may also transform the footnotes into text boxes instead.

2024-09-22 update: translation notes of CTA books. You can find more details and current work in progress at the "Books with my translation notes added" section of the Links page.