Thai language classes have been really interesting. I have learnt a fair bit already although it is kinda information overload! They try and cram a lot of information into a couple of weeks. To start off with, we learnt greetings, a lot of the useful verbs, and basic sentence structure. It does seem to be quite simple in that they don’t use as many words as we do in English which is good! So for example, they would say ‘I go shop’ where we would say ‘I am going to the shop’. That’s like half the number of words!
As we progressed, we learnt how to talk about ourself versus other people, how to say I want and I would like, I can and I cannot, and how to ask questions. They have a word in Thai – mai which has to be said in a rising tone because it can also mean no or new, but said with the correct tone, adding the word to the end of a sentence is how you ask a question. So using the same example, ‘I go shop’ with the word mai at the end means ‘should I go to the shop?’!
The order of the words in the sentences are quite different as well! When describing something, you add the adjectives after the noun so ‘house big white’ instead of ‘big white house’! That actually makes more sense to me. It’s easier to picture what is being described if you have the noun before the adjectives. And then the words can and cannot go after the verb so you would say ‘I go shop cannot’ instead of ‘I cannot go to the shop’. It’s quite different and difficult trying to think in this way instead of just trying to translate the English directly.
The other interesting thing is that it seems that there isn’t a word for yes! You just give a positive response by repeating the verb back if you agree! So ‘do you understand?’ would be answered ‘understand’. ‘Should we eat?’ is answered ‘eat’! ‘Do you want to go to the beach?’ is answered ‘want’, ‘go’, or ‘want go’. All are acceptable in this case. It means you really have to listen to what is being said! Very different to English where we just answer yes or no sometimes without really having listened to the question!
It’s funny how learning someone else’s language changes your perspective. I think we frequently think well they should all just learn English! Like it is easy! I think for us native English speakers, we don’t really realise just how hard our language is to learn! I saw this recently which made me laugh!
