Learning to speak Thai.
I have been trying, without a lot of success, to learn Thai. I have gained quite a large vocabulary of Thai words but when I try to utter them well lets just say that I have a long way to go to have a meaningful conversation with anyone.
Take last Sunday for example, now My Thai Friend was away at the local community college and I was left to my own devises. Needless to say, being a somewhat typical man, I dossed around for an hour or two enjoying my own company before finally summoning the energy to have a shower and clean my teeth. I figured as it was Sunday I would leave the shave! Anyway after a leisurely bowl of cereal I settled down to write a bit on the blog and tinker with the design.
A few minutes later, my attention was drawn to some idiot pipping their horn outside on the soi, well curiosity got the better of me and I went for a look.
Bugger, it was the s*it man come to empty my overflowing septic tanks.
Now normally when he comes, we just exchange greetings, he empties the tank, I pay him, we exchange greetings and he drives off to get rid of the contents of the truck.
Well we exchanged greetings, but then he started asking me something in Thai, needless to say I didn't understand, but he's figured this out, so with the aid of some hand gestures from him I got the impression he wanted to bring the hose from the truck through the front gate. I opened the gate and bingo he seemed happy.
Now I wanted to get back to wasting my time so I took the money out to pay him before he had finished. Big mistake-because he wants to talk to me!
Picture the scene, me standing, him crouching Thai style near the open septic tanks.
We are getting nowhere, but at least he's still sucking up the contents. He starts making a gesture of writing, I figure he wants to leave a note for MTF, perhaps he wants to increase the price for his service, so I go and get him a pen and paper. On seeing what I have bought him he just gives me a big smile but makes no effort to write anything instead he says something in Thai and holds up his phone as if making a call. Perhaps his phone battery is dead and he wants to borrow my phone? I go and fetch my phone, he looks at it and just shakes his head. Now I know its a couple of years old but it is a V5 Razr!
Anyway I pay him and he seems happy we exchange greetings and he leaves.
Only later did I find out that MTF had asked him to give us a receipt for the money we pay for his services and he was trying to explain to me that he didn't have one to give me.
Yes I know I really do need to study Thai some more!
Whilst on the subject of learning Thai this article in Not the Nation brought a smile to my face, not quite sure where I fit in but I certainly don't earn 350,000 baht a month!
In fact I really enjoyed the read so I have added it to the sidebar of this blog under T.I.T and no I am not being rude it stands for This is Thailand-check it out if you get a minute-guess it will appeal more to those of you who are in country and you would already know what T.I.T means anyway!
4 comments:
As far as it goes, that article is right, but the implied causal relationship is wrong. Those at the bottom of the food chain do often speak more Thai. It helps to stretch their meager earning and live more economically.
The higher paid expat executives are paid, not to go local, and are moved regularly to prevent that happening. Their job is to enforce and, toe the company line, of the Mother Ship.
They neglected to mention the long-term, entrepreneurial expats, who have business entities and who's Thai savvy serves them very well indeed.
From personal experience, I have Thai friends who's English is as good or better than my Thai. As a long-term resident of their country, however, we always speak Thai together. In any country, it is considered in bad taste, not speak the native tongue, especially if you have made the place your home. We don't appreciate it in our own native lands, so why should it be any different here?
Once again you offer some interesting insight. I totally agree with you regarding learning Thai and for me personally I consider it a must, like yourself. I know it will take time but I intent to stick at it. Thanks for taking the time to comment.
Thanks for submitting this post to the Expat Experience blog carnival. I'm currently going through all the submissions and will notify you when the carnival gets published.
What an experience :-)
Sometimes you just have to accept the fact that you don't understand some requests or conversations. It can be frustrating, but that's the price of this awesome experience of living abroad :-)
It seems this blog and VF's own cross similar themes, and in similar but vastly different contexts.
What do you recommend for a 'Perpetual Traveller', one who's home may be in several countries? Or for those of us whose "second lanuage" is not English but a language designed to be interpretted by computers not humans? Sadly very little computer code is written in anything by English which sort of leaves me in the 'poo' ;-)
Luckily my wife understands that in time Thai will be part of my vocabulary, but not until one of the other 'languages' subsides, leaving me with a little more grey matter free!
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