Gay Boy Thailand

Am I lacking the motivation to use Thai? I was eager to learn Thai when I signed up for the school. I don’t’ have that sense of urgency anymore, but this is in part because I have learned survival Thai now. I know basic taxi driver Thai, chat up boys Thai, buy food on the street Thai.

Some say the best way to learn Thai is to get a Thai boyfriend. Well, it helps but less than I expected. My boyfriend “Chalerm” is ambivalent about my Thai efforts. He likes that I study Thai and in the beginning he was enthusiastic about it. But he expected me to learn and remember a Thai word after telling me once. That rarely happened. Chalerm doesn’t have the patience to repeat a word over and over, or to correct my invariably wrong pronunciation. For this I had to depend on my teacher.

Chalerm can be cheeky and pretend he doesn’t understand what I say in Thai even if he does. He says he does this because my poor pronunciation is annoying. My broken Thai can be unbearable at times, I understand.

We had an argument over this when Chalerm began learning English at the university and expected me to help him. I said he had to help me with my Thai in return. This didn’t work so for a while we were in a stalemate. But the situation has improved lately. Partly my Thai is not as hopeless as it once was, partly we speak more because Chalerm does enjoy speaking Thai when he knows I can understand it.

Even if Chalerm is a central Thai (not from Isaan) his pronunciation is a little different from my middle class Bangkokian teacher. This means he sometimes will correct what my teacher taught me. I have noticed this with other Thais too. They are convinced that their own way of saying something is the only way it should be said. But luckily Chalerm doesn’t speak with his thick and fast village accent when he is in Bangkok. I only hear that when he is on the phone with his family.

How much Thai would I like to learn? My aim is to be fluent in everyday conversation. It would be nice to read and write Thai, in particular to read street signs and newspaper headlines. Writing isn’t that important. Reading is limited too. What would I read? If you learn German or French there is a great literature to explore. But I am not aware of any literary masterpieces in Thai. Thais don’t have much of a written culture and they rarely read books.

The specialised Thai they use in news broadcasts, in government affairs or in legal matters seems difficult. I don’t think I need to learn it. Thais like to signal importance by using formal language. Thai has a whole separate vocabulary for dealing with royalty, for example. All languages have formal as opposed to informal words, but owing to the class system in Thailand the Thais seem to go further in using “high” language than most.

Since Chalerm’s English is improving quickly I don’t get to use my Thai as much as I hoped. I live in an English-speaking bubble in downtown Bangkok. Many waiters etc expect to speak English here. The only ones I speak Thai to daily (apart from Chalerm) are the building staff and the taxi drivers. This means my progress is slow. But each time I meet someone who can’t speak English, forcing me to speak Thai, the conversation is a little easier than the last time.

Thais are flattered and happy I learn their language but also strangely reluctant. They enjoy that foreigners don’t understand Thai, as if Thais are members of a secret society speaking in code. When a foreigner learns Thai he breaks into their club and they resent that. Thais like, for example, to speak about farangs literally behind their backs. They will comment on your looks, about what you buy or eat or whatever. I am not taking that anymore, I will turn and say something in Thai to make them shut up if they do this in a market or on the bus. Their embarrassement when I catch them can be fun.

Am I lacking the motivation to use Thai? I was eager to learn Thai when I signed up for the school. I don’t’ have that sense of urgency anymore, but this is in part because I have learned survival Thai now. I know basic taxi driver Thai, chat up boys Thai, buy food on the street Thai.

Some say the best way to learn Thai is to get a Thai boyfriend. Well, it helps but less than I expected. My boyfriend “Chalerm” is ambivalent about my Thai efforts. He likes that I study Thai and in the beginning he was enthusiastic about it. But he expected me to learn and remember a Thai word after telling me once. That rarely happened. Chalerm doesn’t have the patience to repeat a word over and over, or to correct my invariably wrong pronunciation. For this I had to depend on my teacher.

Chalerm can be cheeky and pretend he doesn’t understand what I say in Thai even if he does. He says he does this because my poor pronunciation is annoying. My broken Thai can be unbearable at times, I understand.

We had an argument over this when Chalerm began learning English at the university and expected me to help him. I said he had to help me with my Thai in return. This didn’t work so for a while we were in a stalemate. But the situation has improved lately. Partly my Thai is not as hopeless as it once was, partly we speak more because Chalerm does enjoy speaking Thai when he knows I can understand it.

Even if Chalerm is a central Thai (not from Isaan) his pronunciation is a little different from my middle class Bangkokian teacher. This means he sometimes will correct what my teacher taught me. I have noticed this with other Thais too. They are convinced that their own way of saying something is the only way it should be said. But luckily Chalerm doesn’t speak with his thick and fast village accent when he is in Bangkok. I only hear that when he is on the phone with his family.

How much Thai would I like to learn? My aim is to be fluent in everyday conversation. It would be nice to read and write Thai, in particular to read street signs and newspaper headlines. Writing isn’t that important. Reading is limited too. What would I read? If you learn German or French there is a great literature to explore. But I am not aware of any literary masterpieces in Thai. Thais don’t have much of a written culture and they rarely read books.

The specialised Thai they use in news broadcasts, in government affairs or in legal matters seems difficult. I don’t think I need to learn it. Thais like to signal importance by using formal language. Thai has a whole separate vocabulary for dealing with royalty, for example. All languages have formal as opposed to informal words, but owing to the class system in Thailand the Thais seem to go further in using “high” language than most.

Since Chalerm’s English is improving quickly I don’t get to use my Thai as much as I hoped. I live in an English-speaking bubble in downtown Bangkok. Many waiters etc expect to speak English here. The only ones I speak Thai to daily (apart from Chalerm) are the building staff and the taxi drivers. This means my progress is slow. But each time I meet someone who can’t speak English, forcing me to speak Thai, the conversation is a little easier than the last time.

Thais are flattered and happy I learn their language but also strangely reluctant. They enjoy that foreigners don’t understand Thai, as if Thais are members of a secret society speaking in code. When a foreigner learns Thai he breaks into their club and they resent that. Thais like, for example, to speak about farangs literally behind their backs. They will comment on your looks, about what you buy or eat or whatever. I am not taking that anymore, I will turn and say something in Thai to make them shut up if they do this in a market or on the bus. Their embarrassement when I catch them can be fun.

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.