Spelling

Have you ever done one of those spelling competitions? Well I currently feel like I am in one continually. I am learning Tibetan and that has so far turned out to be harder than I hoped for. One of the things I have been struggling with is the spelling. I am now slowly getting the hang of it, but it is still hard. Let me give you a little taste: the syllable in the picture above here is pronounced something like: "jee", but when spelling it out it is pronounced something like: "ba sagado garado ja gigu ji gasa jee". Each bit spells out a bit of the syllable and it means something like: "ba (the first letter) and sa (the top of the stacked letters) on top of ga (the middle of the stacked letters) becomes ga on top of ra (the bottom of the stacked letters) becomes ja with a gigu (the accent, which is really a vowel) becomes ji followed by ga (the third letter) and sa (the last letter) becomes jee". I am not entirely sure what this word means (it seems to be something like 'to arrange' according to my online dictionary), but it is an example of one of the more complex syllables, so I thought it would make a good example.

Please note that the romanisation I have used here is only very approximate as some of the sounds (and especially the tones) in Tibetan are not easily romanised.