Learning Thai

Learning Thai is exciting, but it makes my brain hurt. I never really went beyond the basics when I lived in Bangkok (Hello! How are you? I need to go to Soi 18! How much? Oh, too expensive, can you give me a discount?), but this time around I’m determined to figure out everything from sentence structure to the dreaded tones.

I work in an office where Thai and various Burmese languages are the main modes of communication. Sometimes all I can make out is the low roar of sound that makes up languages I don't know, and many other times I understand snippets of sentences but not the whole idea. Being at the beginning stages of knowing a language is pretty amusing, because usually I understand conversations like this: “...she speaks Kachin, yes?...twenty-two or twenty-three...no way!...chicken.”

Asking for help can be a landmine. Someone will explain how important it is that I know how to say [X], but warn me not ever to say [word that sounds exactly like X], because then I will have insulted someone’s mother. Learning Thai is dangerous business.

Today, though, I practiced with co-workers and learned some useful things. For example, a cheeky twist on a classic Thai phrase, kin kow rian (have you eaten yet?): kin lao rian (have you had whiskey yet)? That one will come in handy, I think. I was also told that I should know how to say pet, spicy, but I can’t get that confused with bpet (which sounds almost exactly like pet, by the way) because bpet means duck, and that wouldn’t make any sense.

Kin bpet pet dai: I can eat spicy duck.