Gay Boy Thailand

It is annoying to be in a country where I don’t understand the language. I feel left out. I had decided that I could not live in Thailand without learning Thai, so I signed up for classes at one of the schools in Bangkok.

Before I started I had tried a cassette course I bought at Asia Books. I didn’t have the self-discipline to keep going for more than a few pages. And the people on the tape spoke too fast. I could not catch what they said.

I had heard a lot about the tones and how difficult they were. There are five tones in Thai: high, low, rising, falling and flat. So in a way you have to sing when you speak Thai. Some swore that the tones were impossible to learn. Some said I should not even bother to learn the tones, as Thais would guess what word I meant. This was bad advice. Without the correct tone a word will change meaning from, say, “come over here”, to “dog” to “horse”, or mean nothing at all. Ignoring the tones will not get you far.

In the event the tones were not the obstacle I had feared. I soon learned to pronounce them, even if the rising tone is the most difficult to get right. It was harder to remember which tone to use for which word. Thai is not an Indo-European language, but one of the Sino-Tibetan ones. The words remind me of nothing I have heard before. Since I have nothing to associate the words with I forget them easily.

I got along well with my teacher, who taught me one on one in a cubicle at the school for 300 baht an hour. She was probably the best teacher they had. Still, the lack of professional books or any systematic learning method soon slowed things down.

I learned Thai phonetically, using Roman letters for the Thai alphabet and accent markers to show the tones. This worked well. I didn’t want to go to the school where they make you sit for six month watching others speak Thai without saying a word yourself. Neither did I want a school where they start with the Thai alphabet as if I were a child. Learning conversation based on Roman script kept the motivation up because I could learn to speak quickly.

Actually I didn’t learn quickly. I had about 300 hours of class now and my vocabulary is 500 words at most. I my brain wasn’t wired to understand or remember Thai. If I had spent this many hours learning a European language such as Spanish I would have done much better since my brain *is* wired to understand those languages and all European languages are closely related. The human brain develops language capacity when you are a baby and a toddler and once you are past seven or so the structure is hard to change. I struggled with my Thai. It felt like I was going nowhere but since I can speak simple Thai I guess I must have picked up a little.

Sometimes their teaching surprised me. Consider this list, which my teacher presented me with one day:

mokkaraakhom
kumphaaphan
miinakhom
meesaayon
phrusaphaakhom
mithunaayon
karakadaakhom
singhaakhom
kanyaayon
tulaakhom
phrusajikaayon
thanwaakhom

These are the twelve months of the year. Never mind the tones, how am I supposed to remember these words or keep them apart?

A modern way of teaching the months would be to include them in different chapters in a book based on stories. If learning Spanish I would read about Maria and Jose going on holiday in July and returning in August. That way I might have a chance to remember it. But in my Thai school they simply gave me the list of the 12 months and expected me to learn it till next class. I still can’t remember them.