Listening – tibetanlanguage.school

Want to understand spoken Tibetan? This page contains subtitled videos to help you improve your Tibetan listening skills.

Standard Tibetan is diglossic, which means that the spoken language and the written language are quite different. Still, you can improve your listening skills using either form of the language.

Click below to practice:

All of the audio on this page has text (either subtitles or transcripts) so that you can look up any new words you don’t understand. Click on the “CC” button at the bottom of a YouTube video to turn on Closed Captioning to see if it’s captioned in Tibetan. SoundCloud links should be opened on the SoundCloud website; this will let you view audio transcripts in the description box below the audio player.

Listening to the spoken language

Tibetan audio with Tibetan and English text

This category is useful for beginners who want an English translation to help them understand the audio.

On this website:

MST audio (beginner)
Samuels dialogues (beginner)
SlowReading Tibetan (intermediate)

Other resources:

SlowReading Tibetan (see their full channel for more):

University of Virginia – Mandala audio-visual resources

Many of their videos have transcripts, such as this one.

Tibetan audio with Tibetan text

This category is useful for beginners who want to do an immersion approach. It is also useful for people who already know some Tibetan, and who are comfortable using a dictionary to look up new words. It is also useful for native or heritage Tibetan speakers who want to improve their language skills.

On this website:

Beri Gyalse (intermediate)

General YouTube videos:

Tibetan subtitles playlist (21 videos):

A video on Tibetan pronunciation which references རྟགས་འཇུག་The Application of Signs:

Esukhia audios:

Click on a SoundCloud link in the document below to open the audio. Only the first 5 entries have both an audio and a transcript.

Note: The document may not display on mobile devices. If that happens, you can click on the document link below instead.

esukhia-a1-audio-dialogues

Tibetan audio with English text

This category is useful for people who want to learn new Tibetan words and phrases more passively, without looking things up in a dictionary.

Most of the entries in this section are playlists from Kangba TV:

https://www.youtube.com/@KangbaTV/playlists

Avikrita Vajra Rinpoche (see his full channel for more):

Chemi Time འཆི་མེད་ཀྱི་གླེང་མོལ། (57-video playlist):

Kangba Lecture འཆད་ཁྲིད་སྒྲོན་མེ། (126-video playlist):

Champa Talk Show བྱམས་པའི་ཁ་བརྡ། (156-video playlist):

Gelsang Blossom སྐལ་བཟང་མེ་ཏོག (62-video playlist):

Documentary དངོས་ཟིན་བརྙན་ཕབ། (33-video playlist):

Tibetan Oral History Project (see their full channel or website for more):

Buddhist history class:

Christian movie:

Listening to the written language

Most of these resources are audio recordings of Tibetan literature, so they naturally include Tibetan text.

Tibetan audio with Tibetan and English text

iSpeak Tibetan (see their full channel for more):

Note: to view the transcript, please open this video on YouTube. The translation and transcript for this video are in the description box below the video. All their videos since this one (published on March 12, 2021) have transcripts in the description box.