Repeated, meaningful practice in every day life (aka: Tips in Language Learning)

My full time job at this point is to learn the Thai language. When I started this a couple of months ago, this primarily involved book learning, as I had to relearn the Thai alphabet (which has 44 consonants and 28(ish) vowels), the tonal system, (5 tones, 4 tone markers which mean 3 different tones when used with the 3 different classes of consonants, and the lack of a tone marker can mean any of the 5 different tones, depending on the class of the first consonant, whether the vowel is short or long, and whether the final consonant is “dead” or “alive”). Just writing about this makes me want to move to a French speaking country...

If you are still reading…you are amazing!

The more I study Thai the more I’m convinced that Thais have to be some of the smartest people on earth. King Ramkamheng the Great invented the Thai alphabet in 1283, based on the Indian alphabets of Sanskrit and Pali. Knowing that his people were incredibly smart, the King decided to make things a bit more challenging by creating a system with no capital letters, no punctuation, and no spaces between words. There is, thankfully, a space at the end of each sentence. So, a Thai sentence would look something like this:

This is John 1:5: "The light shines in the darkness but the darkness has not overcome it."

By the way, did I mention that the vowels can appear before, after, above, below and surrounding the consonants??

Anyway, I went on a little tangent with the explanation of the Thai language, but my point was that there was plenty of classroom learning to keep me busy when I first arrived. However, now I’ve learned all of the rules to navigate the Thai language, and although I still have problems with my high and rising tones, there is little more book learning for me, it’s all about vocabulary building, increasing my comprehension and sharpening my tones.

So, I’m trying to find multiples ways to study Thai, like watching Thai game shows, going to Thai movies (the ones with English subtitles are good if the translation is good because it really confirms what I know and is good for learning new phrases, vocab and slang), hanging out with my neighbors, reading books and studying my Bible in Thai. Tonite I watched a 30 minute Thai infomercial on upcoming seminars of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”.

The best way to learn language, everyone tells me, is in every day use. Well, sometimes I doubt if that’s true for me because I really need to see things written and need to repeat them many times before I’ve really learned them, which is hard to do when I’m at the post office and there is a long line of people behind me and I'm trying to remember the classifer for stamps. But last week I had a good experience of learning language by every day use. It started with a small fire in my house…a citronella candle lit to keep the mosquitoes at bay accidentally became closely acquainted with the pillowcase that covers my printer to keep away the dust. I was able to put it out with no major problems, except that I now need to find something new to cover my printer. But, I decided at this point that since I live in a house with bars on my windows, it would be a good idea to have a fire extinguisher. So, like any good language student I looked in my dictionary to find the word before heading out shopping. But, for some reason this word is not in my Thai/English dictionary (although you will be happy to know that the ever useful words firebrigade and firedamp are in my dictionary…)

So I went to Lotus, the “walmart type” store in my city and used hand motions and sound effects to tell the clerk that I needed a machine that could put out a small fire. He didn’t have one, but taught me the phrase “Kreung Dap Peun” and I went to the Big C, only here I couldn’t quite remember the phrase so I asked for a “Krueng Doot Foon”, which is a vacuum cleaner, but quickly realized my mistake and was again given the correct phrase, but also told that this store did not have one. Finally, at the fourth store I was confident in my ability to ask for a “Kreung Dap Peun” and was easily understood, I couldn’t help but think that the clerks were probably in awe of my linguistical ability……and now my Kreung Dap Peun sits in my kitchen, easing my mind and serving as a constant reminder that the best way to really a language is repeated, meaningful practice in everyday life…..