After you’ve gotten the hang of listening to advanced children’s storybooks in Tibetan, you may want start listening to news articles.
Two Tibetan websites often provide audio recordings of their articles: the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), and Voice of Tibet (VOT). These audio recordings are great for practicing your listening skills.
Central Tibetan Administration (CTA): Tibetan, English
The CTA often has both Tibetan and English versions of the same article. Here is a list of 5 pairs of articles that I found in spring 2024:
- Article one: Tibetan, English
- Article two: Tibetan, English
- Article three: Tibetan, English
- Article four: Tibetan, English
- Article five: Tibetan, English
Note: the CTA’s Tibetan articles always take several minutes to load in my browser.
The CTA’s weekly broadcasts on the TibetTV YouTube channel often read directly from their Tibetan-language articles. For example, this video discusses article two above beginning at minute 8:08, and then discusses article one beginning at minute 8:36. These broadcasts can therefore be used for audio practice. If you don’t readily understand Tibetan, you will have to hunt around to find the matching video for an article based on similarities in their date of publication and the photos used.
YouTube has built-in tools to control playback speed and audio rewinding.
Voice of Tibet (VOT): https://vot.org/
The Voice of Tibet provides audio recordings for many, but not all, of their articles.
The audio recordings on VOT usually only follow the first couple paragraphs of the article, and then diverge entirely into a free-form interview, before wrapping up with the last paragraph of the article. The phrasing of the audio often doesn’t match the article exactly, especially the very first sentence. Nevertheless, it is a very useful tool.
To control playback speed and audio rewinding on the VOT website, you can use my Audio Control Panel program.