Day before yesterday I attended my first Thai language class. Spent the bulk of it reviewing basic greetings, a few core linguistic principles, and learning the names of fruits. While that doesn't sound like a lot of material, it was still kind of overwhelming. I've been all over the world, and have never encountered a language quite like this one. Although a friend yesterday pointed out that Thai has its roots in Sanskrit, and should be easy to learn for anyone familiar with Bengali, Hindi, or Urdu, I can't say that my crusty, street-level knowledge of Bengali is making Thai seem any easier...I've owned a copy of "Practical Thai" for 9 years, since my first visit to Bangkok, and in my subsequent two trips I haven't progressed much beyond basic greetings and haggling for goods while shopping. This is not easy to learn, because it has no vocabulary overlap or root similarities to the romance languages or English, the sentence structure seems quite different from anything I'm familiar with, and because so much of it seems to be tonal in nature. In our class, the teacher spelled out the words in English, then used arrow signs to point out that Thai has rising tones, falling tones, and accents that change the meaning of each word. I've never seen anything quite like it. This is going to be quite a process, and hopefully in a few months I'll have enough competence to be functional in conversation with the good folks here. Dare to dream...
I did find it fascinating that verbs in Thai are not conjugated in a dozen different tenses to convey when something occurred. Instead, you use the present tense, and add the words that mean "already" or "will" to indicate when things will happen in time. That would seem to indicate this language is much more rooted in the present moment than, say, English, with its preponderance of ways to indicate the past and future. There's some profound insight in there somewhere about the Thai perception of time, but I can't quite put my finger on it yet. More lessons will hopefully illuminate more meaning, and shed more light on these wonderful new people I'm lucky enough to call neighbors.
I've studied a bit of Thai, but never got far. The tonality was definitely one of the hardest parts for me! I can hear it when others speak, but have a terribly difficult time getting it right in my own voice, and remembering which of the five (?) tones on any given word mean what. Also, in English we tend to end a sentence with a rising tone to indicate a question, but in Thai that can change the actual meaning of what you say, so I found it extra difficult when asking a question!
ReplyDeleteFortunately, I've found most native Thai speakers to be very forgiving. They may chuckle at your sentence but are delighted that you are trying, and willing and able to infer what you meant to say.