Yeah I know you've all been on the edge of your zafus waiting for the new Tibetan Language course to open at UC Berkeley/UCLA. Well wait no more Fall 2016 Course: Elementary Tibetan Language (Distance Learning) And since Berkeley is the origin of the course I thought I'd throw in a link to their other DL courses/programs Online Learning | UC Berkeley Extension
Even though we're in Berkeley, my wife has been studying the Tibetan language for 4 or 5 years through a very clever distance course from the Tibetan Language Institute in Montana. Home study written material and text, plus a weekly one-hour telephone call, with 20 or more people on the line. It works well, she says. Tibetan Language Institute Website
ཐུགས་རྗེཞེ་དྲག་ཆེ་། What I mean to say is - thanks very much, Dr. Bear. Looks like it's far less expensive than the on-ground Berkeley course; Level I and II materials are a very reasonable $315. And from reading the site, it's got a decidedly good vibe. I feel that's necessary - it helps a lot in any language studies. Probably why I've never been to Pyongyang. :smile: J.
Most Westerners who learn Tibetan probably do so in order to read the Tibetan Buddhist canon, a huge treasury of Buddhist literature totaling a whopping 4,500 individual works. Many of these works were originally Indian texts translated from Sanskrit originals, but many of the originals no longer exist and the texts only exist today in Tibetan translation. (Or did until recently, before the Chinese communist destruction of the Tibetan monasteries.) Much of this material hasn't been translated into English or other modern European languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_Buddhist_canon Buddhist scholars' motivations for learning Tibetan are analogous to Christian theology students' motivations for learning Hebrew and Greek.
