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Ten Years Tibetan in 10 minutes | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| zohan Triglot Groupie Romania Joined 5254 days ago 45 posts - 45 votes Speaks: Romanian*, English, Swedish | Message 49 of 62 26 July 2011 at 8:41am | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't understand how it can take you 1 month (and still counting) to learn an alphabet?
The Japanese alphabets can be learned in a week, maximum two. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| davidwelsh Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5529 days ago 141 posts - 307 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, Norwegian, Esperanto, Swedish, Danish, French Studies: Polish, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Pali, Mandarin | Message 50 of 62 26 July 2011 at 2:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
Read the first post in the thread. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| zohan Triglot Groupie Romania Joined 5254 days ago 45 posts - 45 votes Speaks: Romanian*, English, Swedish | Message 51 of 62 27 July 2011 at 8:30am | IP Logged | |||||
Reading your first post only made me more curious. Why would it take you ten years to learn the Tibetan alphabet if you studied 10 minutes everyday? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5956 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 52 of 62 30 July 2011 at 2:12am | IP Logged | |||||
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Hey zhanglong,
I hope you are continuing with this elegant project, now that I have gotten hooked in following along. I intend to undertake the same project myself if you don't mind a copycat. I became re-interested in the Tibetan language as a result of your log, and as a result of finding the following interesting English line purporting to be a Tibetan saying: "Half of the words are read by implication." I am delighted to see others are also interested in the Tibetan language and perhaps we can share resources down the road, but as I love calligraphy, I expect I will be lingering with the interesting characters quite a while before forward to the rest of the language. Edited by Spanky on 30 July 2011 at 2:15am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4929 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 53 of 62 31 July 2011 at 4:01am | IP Logged | |||||
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"The Buddha's teaching were allowed to take root in Tibet in an isolated context, undisturbed, and almost in secret for over 1,000 years. Because they were not distracted by external busyness, the Tibetans were able to deeply immerse themselves in the teachings and develop very strong habits of the practice. The broad and open spaces of Tibet offered an environment where people could rely on the spiritual methods in a strong way. The West is different. In the distractions and crowds of the cities there is not as much time to practice spiritual traditions in same way, and so maybe there is a challenge to allowing the teachings of Buddhism to take root here in a deep way."
--HH the Gyalwang Karmapa, the 17th incarnated head of the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism Substitute the tenets of Buddhism with the study of language and you will see that the idea is the same. We all study languages far from our own for many different reasons. Yet whether it's for professional advancement or personal fulfillment, our study is a refuge for some, a conduit for others, and a source of great joy. If you don't love what you're doing, why do it? 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4929 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 54 of 62 21 November 2011 at 9:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Three months have passed since my last post.
I ordered a copy of the Hodge book and was told by the American bookseller ( Barnes and Noble ) that it was shipped. Somewhere between America and China, the book is missing, confiscated, lost, destroyed, who knows? Trying to find a book about a non-Mandarin language here in Guangzhou, China is not easy to do. There are few, if any, books on Shanghainese, Tibetan, or heaven forbid, Manchu. The language landscape in China is becoming, with each passing year, more and more homogeneous. So it is with a heavy heart, that I suspend my studies of Classical Tibetan. Learning about the letters, and attempting to learn parts of this language without books or classes, and depending upon websites and Wikipedia, can be quite fun, but my time is such that I really should focus on the languages I should be learning, rather than the languages that attract me. As I said in another thread: "If I had more time..." 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6582 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 55 of 62 21 November 2011 at 10:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
Surely not. You can walk into any bookstore and find a dozen books about English. Non-Mandarin Sintic languages, however … I remember my dismay when I walked into a store selling DVDs in Foshan, right in the heart of Cantonese-speaking Guangdong. I asked for some help to find some movies in Cantonese, but there were none. There were several Hong Kong movies, but all had had their original Cantonese ripped out and replaced with Mandarin dubs. There were also a lot of Hollywood movies, all with double audio tracks in English and Mandarin. The Chinese are a practical people. If it won't make you rich, it's not valuable (and who can blame them, as they've experienced a lot of life-threatening poverty over the last century?). Mandarin and English will make you rich, whilst other Sintic languages will not. Hence, these languages are sick giants, moribund languages with millions of native speakers. Cantonese is still associated with some pride in Hong Kong (though native speakers will get genuinely angry if you suggest their language could be written down as literature) and Hokkien is doing alright in Taiwan, but the rest are objects of shame for their native speakers, and inconvenient obstacles to the government. Everyone seems to feel like it would be better for all if they just crawled up into a corner and died. We can lament it all we want, but if the people themselves treat their languages with such contempt, there is nothing we can do to save them. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4929 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 56 of 62 27 November 2011 at 7:31am | IP Logged | |||||
I purposely took my time to reply because I wanted this to sink in. You are absolutely right. We in the West have a different perception of what is valuable than the native-born Chinese. Of course we do. Two different cultures and histories will do that to a people. It is just a little sad to see people in Lhasa describe their mother tongue as "useless" because the real money to be made is in Mandarin. Beijing, of course, is where the power is, and speaking a "provincial" or "backwards" language won't help you on the career ladder. Yet, something is missing when you forget who you are and where you come from. As Beijing razes its historic hutongs, bulldozes temples, and eliminates vestiges of its historic past, one wonders at what point will they replace 包子 (baozi) with Big Macs and become thoroughly western? 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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