I really like Tibetan people! And I want to be able to talk to them and express myself in a way that will be understood naturally.

The early years to now

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, since she continued to struggle with it. Before the internet, it was challenging to find materials, but they have become more useful and available over time. Even so, the materials for second-language learners are few and not easy to come by so I have started making my own, and also been creating more and more vocabulary guides for myself and my students based on the wealth of educational materials in creative commons online. Since Covid opened up the virtual world, I also now benefit from some wonderful tutors who help me to answer the finer points about the...

Quirks of Tibetan 

Years ago, 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. Since 2024 I have also been able to use the increasingly available and excellent translation tools of Bing, Google Translate, and especially Monlam.ai to help guide my efforts.

How the Channel started

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.

The "-ing" technique

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 

About the name

Why ManjuTib? It is a blend of Manjushri, the buddha of wisdom, and Tibetan. It is a name you can search for online and you will always find your way here because it is unique.

An academy is a school that teaches a particular subject. This is an ecosystem of online and in-person learners and they are all supported by the materials and resources provided here. 

My wish

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

ManjuTib

2026-02-07: streamlined the website page navigation again. Working on a Small Talk Bootcamp course. Thinking to make it into a LinkTree or Patreon product. 

2026-02-01: again revisiting CTA books. I started hitting a brick wall again every time I came up against umed script, so I have dug into making the materials teaching this a bit easier to navigate. I'm creating vocabulary notes for a lot of the early childhood education stuff. Even though it seems simple, there is good and revealing stuff that is hiding in there that becomes quite useful later on. The spreadsheets on my translations page are evolving rapidly as I give full reign to my obsession with mastering this stuff...

2025-09-30: revisiting Esukhia and CTA resources for beginner materials. I finally found the Esukhia user guide and am planning materials that will support newbies' progress. I'm also learning what I can in a fresh way as I review the materials again. Ideally, I am creating a pipeline here for newbies to gain some confidence and start working with native Tibetan-speaking teachers and language exchange partners to make progress toward fulfilling their mutual goals.

2025-08-26: working on interlinear interpretation guides of the dialogues in Speak Tibetan the Tibetan Way, which I am studying myself and have started using with my in-person students. Planning to finish it and then tackle the Geshe Jinpa dialogues again and then start the Geshe Sopa book. This work has now also (29 August) inspired some phonetics-only introductory work, and plans to generate future courses in four tracks: Practical Life, Cultural, Spiritual, and Science & Dialogue. I have also updated the Mission section below and added Grammar and Higher learning sections to the Resources page. Apologies for the radio silence on YouTube and Patreon. 

2025-08-01: further 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 [this has been on hold since that date...]

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. 

• Leave a comment on one of the ManjuTib YouTube videos. 

• For email inquiries, you can send a message to manjutib108 <at> gmail.com.

• Everything I do can be found at my LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/manjutib