Learning Thai ภาษาไทย

Sawat-dii krap, pom cheu Michael. Yin dii tii dai ruu jak krap. Pom maa Prathet-Amerikaa. Pom ma tii Prathet-Thai maa sawn paasaa-angrit. Bpen kru.

*If any Thai speaker happens to read this, please let me know if I've made any mistakes, kop kun krap!*

After a year in Thailand, my Thai language is coming along decently, given that I rarely get the chance to actually put it into practice. Despite living in Bangkok, or perhaps because of it, I am rarely confronted with a situation in which speaking Thai would actually be more useful or necessary than speaking English.

The above handwritten paragraph is my poorly-written introduction. Hello, My name is Michael. Nice to meet you. I am from the United States. I came to Thailand to teach English; I'm a teacher." It's pretty basic.

I learned some very basic conversational phrases like this early on, even before I moved to Bangkok last year, but I've really been working on reading and writing. My real issue is my extremely limited vocabulary. Even if I can read or sound out a phrase, I often have no clue at all what it's saying unless I really understand the context.

There are a few things that make Thai much easier to learn than a number of other languages. There are no genders, plurals, conjugation, or other quirks that make so many European languages confusing. Also, unlike Chinese which is a character-based language, Thai is alphabetical and phonetic. If you can recognize the symbols, you can at least sound out the word even if you don't know the meaning.

However, there are also some things that make Thai difficult to learn. The first thing is the tones, which is common in a lot of Asian languages. A different tone will change the meaning of the word completely. One common example is the word "glai". It can mean either "near" or "far" depending on the tone. Another difficulty that I've encountered is that there are no spaces between Thai words. Thai is written as one long sentence, and I've had lots of trouble identifying where one word ends and the next begins because my vocabulary is still so basic.

As a fun activity early on in the year, I brought some funny tongue twisters in to my M4 class. I asked my students if there were any good Thai tongue twisters. 

"Teacher, say 'krai kǎai kài gài'", one of my students prompted. This is one of the most famous Thai tongue twisters (meaning "who sells chicken eggs"), and one that most learners of the language will probably run across at one point or another. The students encouraged me and laughed as I failed miserably with the tones time after time. To my ear, all four of these words sounded the same! Finally by pure luck, and slow repetition by one of the patient girls, I stumbled into the correct tones to a chorus of cheers from my small class.

left on my whiteboard for me by some M3 students

In December, when I was with the Australians at Amphawa, I really began understanding the alphabet.  I don't remember why, but one of my coworkers and I were waiting on the group somewhere, and we were passing the time by trying to read one of the signs. "Ahaan, ahaan, ahaan...", we sounded out the words. It was one we recognized- "food". We realized that one of the workers at the food stall was laughing at the two ridiculous farangs slowly sounding out "fooood, foooood, foooood" over and over.

Because the letter representing "L" can also make an "N" sound at the end of a word, it's not uncommon for Thai people (not my students) to read my name as "Mikuhn". At the senior trip a few weeks back, one of the Thai teachers had made name tags for all of the sponsors going along. Whoever it was wrote my name actually using the "N" character. Now all of the teachers at my school outside of my department call me "Mikuhn", and I don't want to correct them.

I understand that there will be a point of diminishing return on my investment into learning Thai. Since I'll be leaving Thailand about a year from now, there will be a point when it will no longer be of substantial benefit to continue studying. I've always enjoyed languages though, and I see Thai as a good challenge for me. I've already got the alphabet down pretty well, although I'm very slow at reading. For now I'll really try to throw myself into my study while I have some free time in Texas.

Resources

In my time studying Thai, my most valuable resources have really been my students who think it's awesome and kind of hilarious when I try to say something in their language. Several of them have told me that they love the way I write Thai, since I form the letters so exactly, and not in the scribble that most native speakers write in (although my Thai handwriting looks pretty juvenile to me!). They are the ones who first taught me to write my name and have encouraged me the most. I've also used a few other resources that I've found to be very helpful:

1. Mango Languages - This is an online program that I find to be much better than Rosetta Stone. The best part is, if you have a library card from a participating city, it's totally free! This is what I used before I left for Thailand and it helped me become basically conversational by the time I arrived. They have dozens of languages to choose from, and I'd recommend this program for anyone wanting to kick off their language learning.

2. Thai for Beginners by Benjawan Poomsan Becker - The first Thai textbook that I purchased at Asia Books soon after arriving in Bangkok. This book is very accessible for beginners. It was really popular with my coworkers last year; several of us used it and we called it the "orange book". I used this book a lot during my term holiday in October and throughout the second term.

3. Living Language: Spoken World Thai - My most recent investment is this 6 audio CD/textbook course that seems fairly comprehensive. I've only done the first few lessons which has been great review. So far it seems like a really good course, and it's what I'm using while I'm home visiting the USA.