The Fall of the Thai Language Barrier

Even Ronald McDonald speaks Thai here... I'm DOOMED!

Many Thai people outside of downtown Bangkok do not speak good English.  It is even more pronounced in Mahachai, the town where the school I teach is located.  Though English studies are mandatory in every school in Thailand, it does not universally produce oral fluency.  I find that many Thai people can read and understand several words and sentences in English, but carrying out conversation is very challenging.

Though its hardly worth mentioning, I was quick to discover these facts.  And because I like to communicate with people and be friendly, I found myself up against a very formidable barrier when trying to accomplish much of anything in my day-to-day life: from teaching to shopping to asking for directions -- even just being friendly.  Smiles and hand motions only go so far :)

Since the first day I arrived here, I've made it a point to learn new words and phrases on a daily basis.  Just about 6 or 7 weeks ago, I decided to take on learning their alphabet.  It looks like this:

In case you haven't noticed, it looks absolutely nothing like English or any Latin-based language.  The Thai language derived from Old Khmer Script.  According to tradition, the Thai script was created in 1283 by King Ramkhamhaeng The Great.  The above are just the consonants.  Whereas English has its 5 vowels as part of the alphabet, Thais consider the consonants their alphabet.  There are a total of 44 consonants.  Outside of this are the 32 vowels.  They look like this (4 are hardly used anymore and are omitted below):

Vowels are placed to the left, above, to the right and below consonants, depending on which vowel it is.  To a foreigner, like myself, this is highly confusing.  We are so used to reading left to right.  And while Thai is read from left to right, you kind of have to recognize what's above, underneath and to the side while reading.  It definitely makes the learning process very interesting!

I decided to take on my studies on a gradient.  I taught myself how to write the Thai numbers, 0 through 10, though the customary Arabic numerals are what's commonly now used here.  After that I took on the 44 character alphabet.

Each character has a sound, then an associative word that uses that sound.  This helps differentiate characters within the alphabet, because despite there being 44 characters, there's actually only 20 unique sounds.  There are 4 different characters that make the sound "K", for example.  The first character is read "Gau Gei", however it is a soft "G" sound, which almost sounds like a "K".  The "Gei" means chicken.  So this character is associated with the word for chicken.

Then there is the issue of tones, voice pitches when reading the character.  There are 3 classes: high, mid and low.  These classes affect the way you say the character when read independently and read within a word.  This is the brick wall I'm currently running up against now.  I can now write, read and say each of the 44 characters, but sometimes my tone is not correct.

Okay, enough with all the didactic gibber jabber.  I'll spare you... for now.  This is a video of me writing and reading each of the characters in the Thai alphabet.  Enjoy.

For the record, I entirely taught myself this alphabet.  I downloaded videos from YouTube, watched them constantly and practiced writing each character until my hand went into a full-on, catatonic, carpel tunnel stasis.  But it was fun and I was always kept at high interest.  I enjoyed approaching Thai friends, showing them my new-found skill.  Their astonishment that I was learning, and getting it right, was real motivation to keep going.

An easy way I remembered each of characters in their proper sequence was through a YouTube video I found.  It's a narrative about a cute little rooster that is trying to find out why Mr. Sun did not rise when he was supposed to.  The story takes you through every associative word of the complete alphabet.  So when I think of the order of the characters, I go through the story in my head.  Because its all in Thai, I wrote a little script for it, according to what I thought was going on.  Check out the video.

Even if you can't understand what's being said, it's still very well done and very cute.

I am now learning each of the vowels.  I can read and write about 8 of them now.  For the last few weeks, I've been studying 3 hours a week with one of the Thai teachers from my school.  I am putting together words and sentences, which is really cool.  I am constantly trying to read the signs when I drive around, which is probably not the safest idea.

This past week I wanted to learn a few new goofy phrases.  It's always fun meeting new Thai people and saying something totally random to them.  I always love their reaction.  Here's a video of "Important Thai Phrases."  Enjoy.

That's all for now.  I hope to be well-versed in writing and reading in the next 3 to 4 months.  So hopefully you'll see a blog some time from now where I'm carrying on whole conversations and reading long, complex, bombastic dissertations, all in Thai :)

I'll leave you with some random pictures from around Thailand over the last several weeks.

Thanks for reading!