Food and Fun - the Thai language

I've had 7 days of language class and I love it. Learning a new language is so revealing of the culture and people. My teacher repeatedly says Thai people only care about food and fun, so the language doesn't have much complicated like tenses, conjugations, or masculine/feminine! Actually, when we ask questions about saying something in the future, does the object have to come after the noun, do you need to repeat the pronoun, she shakes her head at us and in a comical voice says "Think about Thai brain, me so simple". So it sounds easy huh? For the most part it is. The tricky thing is the tones. Thai has 5 tones and they are pretty damn important. If you pronounce the tone for "beautiful" wrong, you are telling someone they have bad luck. Even worse, if you pronounce "experience/done already" wrong, you are saying "the mans body part that women no have" as my teacher would say. The mix-up has happened to me already! I went into a restaurant right after class full of confidence built up by my teacher telling me I am a genius student and ordered kaaw soy, a local egg noodle specialty with slow simmered chicken legs. Instead, I was served white rice because I pronounced "soy" with a falling tone. Bummer.

These tones make spoken Thai quite obnoxious. Listening to women talk is like having squawking parrots trying to out-caw eachother. To get the tones right, I just pitch my voice as harshly irritating as possible. It's actually fun to learn - putting a sentence together is like trying to compose a song. I almost think I should get out sheet music and write notes on the score to follow with words below.

There are personal pronouns, but women don't use them when talking about themselves because it's too formal. Instead they use their name because it's cute to refer to yourself in the third person, or they don't use a pronoun at all. The he/she pronoun (kao) doesn't differentiate between male/female/ladyboy. Sex is not as important in this culture as age is. It's more important to know if someone is older or younger than to know gender. A common greeting is to ask "How old are you" to determine if you show respect or expect it.

The language is very playful and cute. Words are repeated not for emphasis (I like it very very much) but to make a phrase cute and fun. Instead of saying "I'm joking" when using the words, they'll say literally "speak play" - play talking! They really do love their food and fun! The teacher loves to ask us funny questions. "Did you watch beautiful girls dance last night?" "Did you drink whisky with ladyboys?" Just this morning, she asked my friend Robbie literally "When have you experienced to be a man?" which we could only guess meant "How long have you been a man". For us westerners who would usually consider some of these questions a bit invasive, especially in a classroom setting where not everyone knows eachother or anyone else's views and beliefs, it feels a bit awkward. But the teacher, a teeny 30-something beautiful Thai woman, finds these questions hilarious and she laughs so hard she bends over.

As in many languages English has been incorporated and there is a set of words that are a jumble of both languages, referred to as Tinglish. These are mostly English words with Thai accents such as - airport, whisky, chocolate, shopping - even the word for foreigner (farang) came from French foreigners calling themselves "francais" and the Thais pronounced it "fa rang set". So now it's used for any foreigner. Some of the Tinglish is pretty incomprehensible unless you've heard it pronounced that way before. The 7-11 is just called the "seven" but it's pronounced "say-when", and a tissue is called "teet-choo" so you've got to wrap your ears around different pronounciations.

It's really fun learning all these new words and sounds. My teacher says if you don't smile you won't get the pronounciation right and people won't understand you. Most of them don't understand me anyways, but the smile goes a long ways in getting people to help me out. I just didn't realize that the famous Thai smile was part of the language.