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| My handwriting notebook, you know... just tracing :) |
There are a lot of things that are really hard about trying to become a child again in order to learn a language. For one, I am not a child, and my mind had developed to work like a 20 year old (I think…). I am starting to realize that I am too smart for my own good. The method through which we are learning Thai (not sure if it has a name) is basically to learn through hearing and experiencing new words in context. Our Thai Ajaans (professors) speak to us and expect us to infer and imitate their use of each word to adopt it into our growing vocabulary. If we feel the urge to speak in English or translate a new word, we are asked to pause, and “swallow” this urge.
Now, of course we are trained student machines. Every piece of information we receive we acknowledge, contextualize and add it to our learning schema as efficiently as possible, and for languages this means translating. Even though they ask us not to we whisper translations to each other, and write them in our notebook… it’s involuntary, and we resort to it every once in a while. But, there are some class periods where it takes us around 45 minutes for everyone to understand a single new word. We resort to countless repetition and theatrical interpretation of its meaning and each student slowly has an epiphany as to the meaning of the word. At the end of it we all slump back in our chairs… isn’t that enough for one day? But we have 5 weeks to learn in Thai what I have been learning in English for 20 years.
Before coming to Thailand I was told that learning Thai was pretty easy. When I got here I was thinking, no way. And now I’m kind of in the middle. I remember when my host family pulled up to pick me up. After saying “Sawadeeka” (hello) over an over again for about an hour (asking my friends every five minutes, “Wait, what is it again?”) preparing to meet them I thought I was ready for an evening of Thai. My host brothers name put me over the edge. “Yodbordin” “What?” “Yodbordin”, “Sorry, what? A bit slower?” and because I couldn’t resort to asking him every five minutes, “Wait, what is your name again”, we went with Yod. But this is how the first week carried out… learning a new word, and within a minute: “Wait, how do you say that again?” I became frantic, bringing my notebook with me everywhere. But what I was soon to realize is that the first week was so hard because the sounds were so unfamiliar to me. There would be days that would go by where NOTHING would stick, and I would panic, and then I would wake up one morning with everything in my head.
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| When learning how to read, we use a combination of these two charts: one to sound out each letter, and the other to superimpose the tonal inflection of that particular combination of letters. |
The key to this, like anything is practice. The hardest part about that is disciplining myself. I try to practice about an hour a day, plus pronunciation sessions with my host parents. Thai is a tonal language. I never really knew what that meant or thought it was a real thing until I was told I had just said “bad luck” instead of “beautiful”. Each combination of letters has five tones it can take: rising, falling, flat, down or up. Because I can’t speak much yet I try to communicate with body language, and vocal inflections of my voice. But this gets me into a LOT of trouble. Where English speakers might say: “Yuck, I absolutely HATE this game… can’t we play something more fun?” with some attitude and maybe a facial expression at the end. In Thai those vocal inflections completely throw off the person you might be talking to because they can’t detect the proper meaning of the words you are trying to say. That is the hardest thing for me: abandoning my instinct to convey my timidity, confidence, regret, joy or sense of humor I might be feeling through the way I say the words. Thai is a language where you say what you want to say: if it’s a question then ask it if it’s a statement then make it… none of that other fluff. That is really hard.
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| This is the little dictionary I have made for myself with phonetic spellings in English (this is a page with no translations though I have many in my notebook) |
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| Tonights homework (ah!) |
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| How we learned the name of every possible family relation today (ok, we didn't get to great grandparents/aunts/uncles) |
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| Pictures from last week, a temple in Mae Rim |
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| Putting a little gold spec on the Buddha's heart |
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| เพิ่มคำอธิบายภาพ: Thai for "caption" |
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| As promised: pictures from the rice fields! |
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| Rice |
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| A worker pulling crabs and snails out of the patties (like weeding) |
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| A resting shack (usually it is unbearably hot) |
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| cows |
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| I want this to be me in the near future |
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| MY DEAR HANNAH CAME FOR DINNER! this pic was taken on the automatic timer (thank god for that feature!) |
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| Hannah and I cooking... she took such good care of me and her Thai is so good! Such a role model <3 |
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