ภาษาไทย

สวัสดีคร้บ!

Today, I took on the MONSTER, that is the Thai language. New alphabet, tonal language, and sheer fear.

Here we go.

While I was raring to get to started, I was terrified, because I had already gone through this lesson once, and I was appalled at how horrible I did. This time around, I actually felt comfortable, and that I didn't have a reason to be scared. Just like my girlfriend said, "Thai won't bite you."

This lesson was the essential bare bones and most basic of the basic. "Excuse me," "I understand," "I don't understand," "I understand a little Thai," "I understand English," "Yes," "No," and "Are you American?" For those of you who don't know, based on your gender, Thai has a word that you will be adding to the ends of most of your sentences just to be polite. For the ladies, you would add "Ka". So saying hello for you would be "Sawasdee ka". Guys would say "Sawasdee krub". The trickiness comes from simply raising the mandatory things about the language.

Tonal requirements + Ka/Krub + irregular word orders + lots of one syllable words = Difficulty.

Despite all that, I do think I have got a hold on what I covered. Part of me even wants to go back and do the  lesson all over again.

For Thai, the only extra resources I had to help me write in Thai were Google Translate and Thai2English. Both are websites, but the latter was of greater help because it broke down what each word meant, so I'll definitely be using it again.

That brings me to writing in Thai. The letters are weird, and there are a ton of them. It appears to be phonetic, but that doesn't help too much because there are multiple letters for similar sounds (I think there are three for the "Th" sound. Tweeting in Thai was MUCH harder. I'm sad to say that I gave up trying. The letters overloaded my BlackBerry keyboard to the point where some keys had more than one letter in addition to having a whole new page of letters. That's a battle that I will definitely have to pick up another time.

Oh yeah..Thai doesn't seem to have spaces in between words like we do. Either that, or I'm not sure what in the world serves as a marker.

Really..Go try and read something in Thai, and it'll look like a line of characters.

This isn't my favorite language, but I'm forcing myself to learn it. Maybe I'll love it one of these days...


ลาก่อนคร้บ,

Your Favorite Polyglot