Mr. Sonam Rinchen Chusang was born in Amdo, northeastern Tibet. As a child, he went to the Tibetan Children’s Village School in Dharamsala, the capital of the exiled Tibetan community in India. Due to this unique upbringing, Sonam is fluent in both the Amdo Tibetan and Central, or Standard, Tibetan varieties. After moving to Canada in 2001, Sonam began teaching Tibetan and gradually built the Tibetan language resource website LearnTibetanLanguage. (www.learntibetanlanguage.com). Sonam was a lecturer at the University of Virginia’s Intensive Summer Language Program in 2007, and he has also taught Tibetan in many Buddhist communities in the United States and to many students and researchers.
Sonam will continue teaching at the University of British Columbia this upcoming academic year and will teach the newly-offered Introduction to Tibetan 1 (TIBT 100) and Introduction to Tibetan 2 (TIBT 101) courses. For more on these courses, click here.