The Tibetan Language has an issue that shows up very clearly in the “Learn Tibetan” Course. Tibetan syllables are not always spoken the way they are “spelled”. Example from the course:
TIBETAN ## སླབ་གྲྭ་བ་ (slab.grwa.ba) for ENGLISH “student”. The Tibetan word is actually pronounced “lab-da-wa” as the “SLaB” is pronounced “lab”, the “grwa” is pronounced “da” with heavy accent on the “d” such that it’s almost a “dr” sound, and the final “ba” is always pronounced “wa”. Maybe there should be an extra column for the “pronounced” version of the word as this is not an uncommon “feature” of the language. Or something. Just a thought. Thanks for the course.
Hi pfs32,
Sorry for the late answer, I rarely come here anymore (although I’m thinking about getting back at Tibetan).
There are many reading rules which one of this language difficulties, but once you’ve learned them all, reading is not that hard at all. You’ll be surprised how easy it is in the end!
The database is far too big to add the pronunciation for all the words, but I’ll see if I can do that for the most trickery words. I’m a bit busy right now, but I’ll look into that within the next two weeks.
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I think the audio is enough to show the pronunciation, after people have learnt how to pronounce single consonants and some consonant clusters. Maybe more examples (with audio) of consonant clusters could be added though.
I noticed an issue: the audio files for ཚ must be wrong, the male speaker seems to read “tha” and the female speaker “ha”.
Many thanks for this course. It is very useful for beginners or “rebeginners” like I, a good preparation to the study of handbooks like Tournadre’s.
I also believe it is enough, but I nevertheless added a few months ago a help for the trickiest words.
I checked the files for the ཚ tshā, and there is nothing wrong, the audio files are correct. I think the ‘h’ is loud compared to the ‘ts’ sound which might be less heard, but it’s there. 