I'm Learning Tibetan
June 4th, 2004Well, I’m finally doing it — I’ve started studying Classical Tibetan. After many years of procrastinating I’ve taken the leap. You may wonder why anyone would need to know Classical Tibetan — the answer is that it is the language used in all the classical Tibetan Buddhist texts. One of my main interests in life — although not one that is featured in this blog — is Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, which after studying almost everything else, is the only philosophical tradition that is both scientific and useful enough to be of any practical value, in my opinion. At this point I’ve read just about every translation of classical Tibetan texts available in English, so the only way I will be able to go further is to read the original Tibetan texts themselves — there are tens of thousands of incredibly profound and important texts that haven’t been translated yet. I’m very excited about being able to read these myself. The next step after that will be to learn Modern Tibetan so I can actually speak to Tibetans, but that will be later on. So currently I am trying to reshape my brain to write and think in Tibetan, a language that is sort of like a cross between Chinese, Hungarian and Sanskrit! Yikes — it’s a completely new way of thinking and requires incredible concentration, at least at this stage — but I’m hoping that after a few months it will start getting easier. Wish me luck! And by the way if you are serious about learning Tibetan I can recommend a great tutor.