Learning Thai
NOTE: I meant to publish this before I left Thailand, but I didn’t get around to it. I guess better late than never!
When I came to Thailand, I came prepared -- with my Lonely Planet Thai phrasebook. Or at least I thought I was prepared, because my phrasebook turned out to be completely useless. I don't think I had ever heard Thai spoken before I moved here, unless you count the work tuktuk (which we say wrong), and Thai obviously sounded so foreign when I first arrived. The most intimidating aspect of learning Thai is the tones and Thai has 5. Learning Thai felt impossible so I got rid of that little phrasebook.
Fast forward a few months and the Korean music teacher and I are studying Thai with our hardworking school director once a week. She made copies of a workbook for us and we took notes but she also made us speak, which brings us back to the tones: mid, low, high, rising and falling. She wanted us to pronounce the words correctly and in the correct tone. It was too much too soon, and we lost what little motivation we’d had when we started. It didn’t help that I had a huge workload at that time. (Thank you, Khun Linee, for teaching us! Please teach me again now that I love Thai!)
I didn’t make a real effort to learn Thai again until a couple of years later when I started going to a Thai church. The church had just started an English service, but those of us in the English congregation occasionally joined the Thai service. I listened attentively and asked my friends about words I didn't know. I started making a list of words I was learning, many of which were church words. Finally, I was ready to learn.
I made more Thai friends at church and slowly gained enough confidence to speak a little bit of Thai. I studied informally with a friend for a short time, but felt intimidated, so I stopped, but I continued to learn from listening and hesitantly speaking. For whatever reason, I have always had so much fear and anxiety when it comes to speaking other languages, which is good for an English teacher whose students speak English as a second language; I can empathize with their discomfort.
After almost twelve years in Thailand, I'm still at a very basic level of Thai. I can speak to people at the market, at the mall, at the grocery store, at the bank, in the taxi. I can tell people what I want, where I want to go, what I want to do. I feel confident moving around Bangkok by myself because I can communicate well enough to be understood (and if I can’t, I can call a friend). If I had known I was going to be in Thailand this long, maybe I would have taken some classes at some point, but even so, I'm proud of what I have learned just by listening, asking questions and being corrected by brave listeners.
I really like Thai. I think it makes a lot more sense than English. The thing I like most about it is its patterns. When I hear a word I don't know the meaning of, there's a chance the word contains a clue. For example, several abstract nouns I've learned, like love, joy and patience, begin with the word kuam, which is a prefix added to a verb or an adjective to form a noun. Love is kuam rak, joy is kuam suk and patience is kuam o-ton. Here are some other examples.
Colors are preceded by si.
Blue: si fa
Green: si kiau
Yellow: si leung
The words for breakfast, lunch and dinner all contain the word ahaan, which means "food."
Breakfast: ahaan chau ("morning food")
Lunch: ahaan tiung ("noon food")
Dinner: ahaan yen ("evening food")
Places that occupy big buildings often begin with rong, which means something like “big hall.”
School: rong rian (rian means "learn")
Hospital: rong phaya baan (phaya baan means "nurse")
Hotel: rong ram
Words beginning with rot denote a type of vehicle.
Car: rot
Train: rot fai (“fire car”)
Sky train: rot fai fa (“sky fire car”)
Lots of words can be combined with jai, which comes from the word hua jai, which means "heart."
One of my favorites is khao jai. Khao means "to enter," and this combined word means "to understand," or literally, "to go inside the heart."
Kind: jai dee ("good heart")
Impatient: jai ran ("hot heart")
Kang is used in words relating to position.
In front: kang na
Next to: kang kang
Upstairs: kang bon
Downstairs: kang lang
The names of religions begin with the word sasana, which means “religion.”
Christianity: sasana Krit
Buddhism: sasana Phut
Islam: sasana Islam
See how Thai makes sense? As an English teacher of students learning English as a second language, I often apologize to them for the many instances when English doesn’t make sense (like c and k often making the same sound or oo having two very different pronunciations). Is it too late to change some things to make English more like Thai?