Manual of Standard Tibetan | 
| Author: Nicolas Tournadre
Publisher: Snow Lion Publications
Category: Book
List Price: $80.00
Buy New: $40.00
You Save: $40.00 (50%)
New (21) Used (2) from $40.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 71701
Media: Paperback
Edition: Pap/Cdr
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 563
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.9
Dimensions (in): 10.9 x 8.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 1559391898
Dewey Decimal Number: 495.482421
EAN: 9781559391894
ASIN: 1559391898
Publication Date: December 25, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews:
Best of its kind, but not for the faint of heart May 26, 2005
39 out of 39 found this review helpful
Since I've hesitated a long time between Hopkins' "Fluent Tibetan" with tapes and Tournadre's "Manual of Standard Tibetan," I thought it would be helpful to write a comparative review. 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, that is to say, each topic is examined extremely thoroughly (e.g. the spelling variations of the word for "one" and other numbers). Those details are 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.
"Fluent Tibetan" is based on the unsurpassed method devised by the Foreign Service Institute, which aims at developing fluency in a short period of time. The tapes are quite audible and provide an extensive set of oral drills, something I haven't seen elsewhere. Some reviewers have complained about the amount of repetition, but I think being bored with repetition in an indication that one is becoming fluent with the material, i.e., the course is delivering the goods. Drilling is quite important when a language has a very different grammar (from my experience with Hebrew). On the other hand, the vocabulary is rather sparse at about 500 words. I find the main strength of the set is in the drills and in the fact that it is mostly, but not exclusively, based on audio material. The set aims at the low-intermediate level. This can keep you busy for about three months if you keep a good pace.
The "Fluent Tibetan" CD-ROM, available separately, does not have any drills, and in summary is quite useless.
Comprehensive and To The Point July 3, 2004
33 out of 33 found this review helpful
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!
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