Manual of Standard Tibetan: Language and Civilization [With 2 CDs]

By Nicolas Tournadre

The Manual of Standard Tibetan presents the everyday speech of Lhasa as it is currently used in Tibet and among the Tibetan diaspora. It not only places the language in its natural context but also highlights along the way key aspects of Tibetan civilization and Vajrayana Buddhism. The Manual , which consists of forty-one lessons, is illustrated with many drawings and photographs and also includes two informative political and linguistic maps of Tibet. Two CDs provide an essential oral complement to the manual. A detailed introduction presents a linguistic overview of spoken and written Tibetan.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1559391898
• ISBN13: 9781559391894
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: Snow Lion Publications
• Length: 576 Pages
• Weight: 3.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 8.5" x 11.0"

Customer Reviews

Great introduction to Tibetan

This is a great textbook for spoken and written Tibetan. The dialogues are useful and the cds that go along with them are very good. They start with a slow reading of the text, and then go at a more conversational speed, thus your ears can get used to Tibetan step-by-step using the cds. The pronunciation of Lhasa Tibetan is used throughout the textbook, and it is described in detail at the beginning of the book in the introduction. The vocabulary always is given in Tibetan script and phonetic transcript. And the grammar sections are clear and concise. One thing that I really like about this textbook is the way it explains the relationship between spelling and pronunciation. All of the other textbooks on Tibetan that I have seen either don't get into that, or they just explain that the spelling is not phonetic and leave it at that. Few and far between is a Tibetan textbook that actually will explain the details of the spelling system and how that impacts pronunciation, and this one does. Which for anyone trying to learn how to read and write the language, this is fundamental. Thus this book gets 5 stars!

Great book for learning Tibetan

Great book. Had used it before in a Tibetan class at a university but lost it. The informative sections in each chapter also helped prepare me when I went over to Dharamsala to study. The author included great colloquial additions!

Intense detail, linguists will love. Little much for a beginner and the phonetic spelling seems a li

Love it. CDs are great. slow speed conversations then the same ones at normal speed. Lots of context and description and comparisons to other languages - as a beginning Tibetan student and long time Dharma practitioner, I highly recommend!

Best of its kind, but not for the faint of heart

I've hesitated a long time between Hopkins' "Fluent Tibetan" with tapes and Tournadre's "Manual of Standard Tibetan." I ended up getting both, and I find they complement each other quite well. Tournadre's Manual is amazingly comprehensive, quite sufficient, it seems, to keep a student busy trough four semester courses or so. This text is useful to lay a strong foundation to build on later on. Prior to the forty-one Lessons, over forty pages present the reader with a thorough introduction to the alphabet, pronunciation and a clever system of transcription of the author's devising. The latter is helpful in precisely describing the pronunciation of the words introduced at each lesson. I counted about 2000 words in the glossaries at the end, which makes quite a rich vocabulary. The book is also replete with cultural notes, maps and descriptions of the different Tibetan dialects. Another nice touch is the amount of supplementary material, including videos of the dialogues, exercise answer keys and supplementary exercises, all available on the web at the University of Virginia's Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library website. On the down side, I found the lessons very hard going. One sometimes gets lost in detail, which is not always essential at the beginnning. This is probably the typical experience of a self-learner like me, while in a classroom situation the teacher would know when to instruct students to skip over the extra details. It is quite apparent that each lesson needs to be expanded and developed in a classroom situation, with perhaps ten times as many exercises, drills and dialogues as are provided in the book, in order to bring out all that it has to offer. I therefore decided that this book was hard to use as a primary text by a pure self-learner, but is probably the best of its kind for classroom instruction. I use it as a reference and will probably go back to it more methodically when I am done with the "Fluent Tibetan" set.

Comprehensive and To The Point

As a novice trying to learn Tibetan, I have purchased a few books on the subject, and I'm currently enrolled in a Tibetan class. I avoided this book at first because of the high price, but, "you get what you pay for" rang true in this situation. The charts are especially valuable, the explanations are clear, and the dialogues are useful. It also has a healthy content relevant to Tibetan Buddhism and culture. This edition also contains 2 CDs containing all the dialogue, absolutely neccessary in order to capture the correct pronounciation of the Lhasha dialect. An appendix in the back contains a useful bridge between Standard and Classical Tibetan. Simply put, I am extremely pleased with this book and totally "geeked out" by its content!!! It's a beautiful thing, so get it!