But then I started falling asleep during lectures because they were being live translated from Tibetan into English and it's hard to concentrate when someone is speaking a language you don't know but you have to listen to them respectfully like you have a clue what it is they're saying.
As far as I know, Tibetan is one of the hardest languages to learn, if not the hardest (with Polish being the other one). Its "orthographic depth" is all fucked because it's kept the same spelling for most of its words since 620 AD, with some spelling reforms around 800 AD. It's like if English had everything written in Latin, but pronounced like we already do (example: "finally" being spelled "ad ultimum"). So not only is it in a family already difficult for outsiders, there's no way to learn the spelling except by memorizing specific words, which also makes looking up words difficult.
Arabic has a similar life story to Tibetan, where it was spread and kept alive through religious texts (the Koran). But unlike Tibetan, Arabic has localized and standard updates to its writing. Vowels, for example, weren't originally written in the Arabic used in the Koran. Modern Arabic has vowels inserted to make it easier to read (that is what all those , ' ` -looking things are in Arabic script, those are vowels). Tibetan hasn't done this.
It's one of the challenges of improving literacy among Tibetans. A lot of them are like "Have you seen this shit? It may as well be Greek."
I don't know the historic background, but I would totally believe this. I learned a little bit of spoken Tibetan while I was there, but the romanized words are not pronounced at all like they're spelled and pronunciation is difficult in general. It wasn't necessarily the language itself though, it was more that you have a break in concentration where someone is speaking Tibetan for 2 minutes while you stare at them, then you listen to the translator for 2 minutes and try to write things down, then it's back to not understanding for another 2 minutes, etc. I imagine it's a lot more effective when you speak the language. But 2 hours of that a day was really not fun. Still learned a lot though.
Just a little quibble with your point about Tibetan writing - a better comparison would be Modern English written as it was during the Old English period. So like “lord” might be written as “hlafweard”, for example, because it is a direct descendent of that word put through hundreds of years of pronunciation change. English doesn’t come from Latin and “finally” doesn’t come from “ad ultimum”, whereas Tibetan does come from Old Tibetan, the language the script was originally fairly adequately adapted to.
As far as I know, Tibetan is one of the hardest languages to learn, if not the hardest (with Polish being the other one). Its "orthographic depth" is all fucked because it's kept the same spelling for most of its words since 620 AD, with some spelling reforms around 800 AD. It's like if English had everything written in Latin, but pronounced like we already do (example: "finally" being spelled "ad ultimum"). So not only is it in a family already difficult for outsiders, there's no way to learn the spelling except by memorizing specific words, which also makes looking up words difficult.
Arabic has a similar life story to Tibetan, where it was spread and kept alive through religious texts (the Koran). But unlike Tibetan, Arabic has localized and standard updates to its writing. Vowels, for example, weren't originally written in the Arabic used in the Koran. Modern Arabic has vowels inserted to make it easier to read (that is what all those , ' ` -looking things are in Arabic script, those are vowels). Tibetan hasn't done this.
It's one of the challenges of improving literacy among Tibetans. A lot of them are like "Have you seen this shit? It may as well be Greek."
I don't know the historic background, but I would totally believe this. I learned a little bit of spoken Tibetan while I was there, but the romanized words are not pronounced at all like they're spelled and pronunciation is difficult in general. It wasn't necessarily the language itself though, it was more that you have a break in concentration where someone is speaking Tibetan for 2 minutes while you stare at them, then you listen to the translator for 2 minutes and try to write things down, then it's back to not understanding for another 2 minutes, etc. I imagine it's a lot more effective when you speak the language. But 2 hours of that a day was really not fun. Still learned a lot though.
Just a little quibble with your point about Tibetan writing - a better comparison would be Modern English written as it was during the Old English period. So like “lord” might be written as “hlafweard”, for example, because it is a direct descendent of that word put through hundreds of years of pronunciation change. English doesn’t come from Latin and “finally” doesn’t come from “ad ultimum”, whereas Tibetan does come from Old Tibetan, the language the script was originally fairly adequately adapted to.