thai for beginners

Hey, guess what? I can read!

This may not sound like such an accomplishment to you. Probably most of you possess a similar skill yourselves, or else you've hired someone to read your RSS feed aloud. (In which case, hats off for having that kind of disposable income in this economy.)

I'm told that my ability to read took my mother by surprise. Not because I was some kind of Baby Einstein, or the second coming of Matilda, or anything. In truth, I learned to read much later than my vexingly bright older sister, around the same time as most of my peers. But I kept it a secret, I guess, until the day my mother stumbled upon me reading a book aloud in the library. When asked why I hadn't told her that I knew how to read, I imagine myself shrugging and saying snidely, "You didn't ask."

Anyway.

I've been studying Thai for the last two months with the long-suffering Khruu Aajaan. George and Ruthie have also been studying, mostly basic vocab, but they're the only other farang who take lessons. Pippi studied with Khruu Aajaan for a couple days when she first arrived at the shelter, but she got fed up with the alphabet and the memorization. She's more concerned with practicality than academics, and so she now learns a handful of new words every day by asking people the words for telephone, purple, inside. The other volunteers do the same, with varying levels of success.

I, on the other hand, am a nerd. I don't particularly like studying, but I do like learning, and I've grudgingly come to accept that you can't have the latter without the former. I want to learn Thai; I need to learn Thai. Because it's rude not to. Because it'll make my life and my job easier. Because I like a challenge. Because I want to prove that I can. Because that brat Alma speaks four languages, so I really ought to be able to handle three.

Because, really, when am I going to have this opportunity again?

It's commonly agreed by everyone with attached brain stems that immersion is the best way to learn a new language, and I am nothing if not immersed. However, immersion in this particular environment does raise some difficulties, among them the fact that there are about a million different kinds of Thai. I'm learning Central or Standard Thai from Khruu Aajaan, but many of the women speak Northern Thai or Isan - that is, if they speak Thai at all, which brings us to the point that most of our women are not native Thai speakers. They're from Laos, Vietnam, Burma and various hill tribes, and Thai is often their second or third language. I try out my new vocabulary on them, and they stare at me blankly, leaving me to wonder which one of us is the dummy. (Spoiler alert: it's usually me.)

But we're giving it the old college try anyway, me and Khruu Aajaan. One hour every day, we sit together in the little gazebo and attempt to cram knowledge into my "brain" (i.e., a dense, petrified mass of assumptions, beliefs and phenomenally tenacious radio jingles).

From the start, my classes have been a mix of alphabet and vocabulary. In a typical class, Khruu Aajaan will teach me several new phrases or categories of words, quiz me on phrases and words I'm supposed to know, test my grasp of vowel sounds and tones, and have me write the alphabet over and over again.

In case you're wondering, the Thai alphabet is an absolute bastard. I know I'm lucky that there's an alphabet at all, that it's not like Mandarin or Japanese with thousands of symbols you have to memorize, but it's unforgivably complicated all the same. There are forty-four consonants. Some of them sound the same, and some of them look the same, but there is little overlap between these categories. When I first started, the symbols were wholly foreign. They looked like nothing, like little kid doodles, and I had a hard time processing that these squiggles translated to sounds. I learned to differentiate between the groups of similar-looking consonants by thinking of each shape as a vague sketch of some object or animal. "Gaw gai," my teacher would say, and I would think, Is that the tooth? The snake? The owl? The arched cat? The camel?

Once you've mastered the consonants, there are vowels to contend with - thirty-two of them. There's the quarter note, the turtle, the candy cane, the slug, and dozens of others. You can write different vowels before or after or above or below the consonants, or sometimes before and after and above if you really want to be a dick about it.

And then there are the tones: high, low, middle, falling and rising. The same arrangement of letters can make five entirely different words depending on the tone. Some people say tone doesn't really matter. These people are known in Thailand as "dumbasses."

So it's been slow going. I'm spurred on by three main things:

(1) the constant pressure to speak better, understand more, catch up to the other staff members;
(2) my stupid pride; and
(3) the occasional breakthrough.

Which brings us to today, when, as he often does, Khruu Aajaan wrote some syllables on the board to practice consonant sounds. There's a certain ritual to these exercises: he reads off the syllable on the board, I ignore the written letters in favor of parroting the sound coming out of his mouth, he shakes his head and repeats himself, I parrot him again, and he gives up and moves on to the next syllable.

Today, though, he suddenly stopped short in the middle of the exercise and gave me a funny look. He pointed to the board. "You read."

What? I don't read. I can't read. I can barely read English. Recognizing slugs and teeth and camels isn't reading; it's the linguistic equivalent of Concentration.

"You're reading," he said in Thai. "You can read. OK! I write and you say."

He wrote. And, despite my better instincts, I said.

So I guess I can read, sort of. Don't get me wrong - I'm not going to be tackling the Thai translation of War and Peace anytime soon. I stutter and hesitate, and there are plenty of less common letters that I still can't identify on sight. Besides which, being able to read sounds off a page does me very little good if I don't know what they mean.

But still, this is progress. Better progress than I thought I would make, frankly. I can read. Maybe my brain isn't so unyielding after all. Maybe there's hope. Maybe I will actually speak Thai someday. Eventually. Some time before the Earth is swallowed by the sun.

Now if I could just get these goddamn jingles out of my head, we'd really be in business.