Updates: Thai Lessons

Sawadee Kha!



Dichan chuu Sarah, naamsakun Martins. Pen khon Nederland. Tham ngaan thii kruntheep. Pen khruu.
My name is Sarah Martins. I am from the Netherlands, I work in the 'City of Angels'. I am a teacher.
(and I know how to count in Thai :-)

This all sounds very good..but THai is a tonal language which means that a word may have two or more distinct and unrelated meanings depending on the tone it is pronounced!! There are five of them...each represented by a marker above each word.. sometimes there are more than three tones in one word. Yikes!!
For example the word 'May' can mean either no/not, new, silk or as a question word!

To learn the sounds the school has written their own phonetic script (There is no official Thai phonetic system as yet) and me being a language teacher tried to relate them to our phonemic scripts. Many of the vowel sounds overlap but others are just near impossible (they have 26 in total compared to our 20).

Lessons are on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 6:30 - 8:30 with a group of two other women (Suprisingly no men! Thank goodness.. starting to think that there were only men in BKK), one from England who has just moved here with her boyfriend and has just finished doing the CELTA and is starting a job teaching English to 5 year olds at a private Christian school, the other is Chinese and works as an actuary for an insurance company.

I tried out all my new words and phrases on Khun Tim the next day - of course she didn't understand a word I was trying to say!! LOL! Perhaps I am better off with my gestures and signs!! :-)