Learning the Tibetan Alphabet

I have not really covered how to write Tibetan letters. There are tools (see earlier postings) where you could type in Wylie and the output is Tibetan letters.

If you search the web there are also many wonderful sites that show how to draw and pronounce the Tibetan letters.

One main reason I left this out is that we could spend a very long time going through the letters and pronunciation, and for a while there's not a sense of progress, even if there is. But by going directly for words and sentences you get the big picture, and the hope is that you see that recognizing and translating sentences is not so hard (it gets hard later, and then it's easy again).

However, it's really important that you learn how to read the letters, it should not take that long if you spend some time learning them. A couple of tricks:

• Use a big notebook and just draw the same letters, over and over again, after a while the brain has the pattern programmed into your mind, so you see them clearly.
• Just be brave and look at Tibetan texts over and over, first it looks strange, but after a while you start to see the letters, words, and other patterns. It's a big win if you start recognizing letters and single words, and then it accelerates from that point forward.
• Take a couple of words and learn to write them, see them in your mind, and go over them from time to time (I used to write Tibetan words on a big whiteboard at work, and co-workers always were fascinated about the strange letters).
• Learning famous short statements from the texts also help, write them down over and over again.

Unlike other Asian languages, the Tibetan language has syllable-based letters (not pictograms), and also you could somehow read it from beginning to end (see other postings about the issues), so there's less of a learning curve.

PS: This was the 100:th posting, so it was indeed appropriate to talk about the Tibetan letters.