How to Read Classical Tibetan Series

How to Read Classical Tibetan, Volume Two: Buddhist Tenets continues Craig Preston’s groundbreaking series of self-study materials designed for students learning to read Classical Tibetan on their own. This book serves a dual purpose: the student learns both grammar and philosophy at the same time.With easy-to-understand diagrams, Preston shows how to find your way through Tibetan sentences. It is like having a personal tutor at your fingertips, allowing you to proceed at your own pace through a wealth of material. As you work your way through an actual Tibetan text, Preston offers guidance at every turn. He explains the meaning of new words as they arise. He also offers a complete glossary of all the words at the end of the book. As you encounter new grammatical constructions, he walks you through understanding their meaning. He shows you how to break down Tibetan sentences into small pieces and then how to put those pieces back together to form clearly understandable English sentences. The book also helps students of the Tibetan language gain entry into the genre of tenets, which is the comparative study of the original schools of Buddhist thought in India. He introduces the rich vocabulary of Buddhist philosophy without assuming any prior knowledge, offering simple, easy-to-understand explanations of complicated ideas. Preston thus provides a complete language course.

Do you want to learn to read Classical Tibetan? How to Read Classical Tibetan will show you—at your own pace—all the relationships that make Tibetan easy to read. It is a complete language course built around the exposition of a famous Tibetan text, Summary of the General Path to Buddhahood, written at the beginning of the fifteenth century. All the language tools you need to work at your own pace are in one place. You won’t need a dictionary because all the words and particles are translated and explained upon every occurrence, and there is a complete glossary at the end of the book. Every sentence is diagrammed and completely explained so that you can easily see how the words and particles are arranged to convey meaning. Because everything is always explained in every sentence, you will easily learn to recognize the recurrent patterns making the transition from learning words to reading sentences much easier for you. As you study How to Read Classical Tibetan, you will learn to recognize the syntactic relationships you encounter, understand the meaning signified, and translate that meaning correctly into English.