How (not) to buy a horse in Bangkok

With pictures and diagrams

It got chilly here so I finally went downstairs to our storage room to get our radiators. And to store away our Sukkoth decorations that have been sitting in our living room since before the war.

By “Sukkoth decorations” I mean our old dog fence that Maya hung a sheet over to make a ‘sukkah.’

And by “finally” I mean I should have done it earlier but I was too busy.

I was learning Thai.

I can explain. I promise I’m not the kind of person who takes up one language and then switches to another a month later because her monkey brain demands more stimulation.

Actually no, I can’t promise that.

What happened is I urgently had to talk to someone who speaks only Thai. I gave myself a week to get there. I promise I’ll tell you all about it soon, but today I just want to tell you about my crazy hard week.

Never mind all those people who don’t know when/if they’ll see their family members who have been kidnapped by a terrorist organization.

Having to learn Thai in one week is what makes one’s life hard, ok?

Thai is a tonal language. Tone is the variation in the pitch of our voice when we speak.

For instance, in English, when I say “My dog ate a sock” my voice goes down at the word ‘sock’. But when you ask me, in disbelief, “Your dog ate a sock?” your voice goes up.

In English, pitch doesn’t change the meaning of a word (or the fact that my dog did indeed eat a sock). But in Thai, it does. So, the word máa with a high tone means ‘horse’, and mǎa with a rising tone (your voice goes from low to high) means ‘dog.’

Something to keep in mind before you go to a pet store.

If you’re not used to tones, they’re maddeningly hard to grasp. My main rule when learning a new language is to start speaking as soon as I can. But this time I couldn’t do that because by day 3 I was still only able to say “I am ok” (chǎn oo-khee), even though I didn’t feel okay.

The Thai writing system supposedly tells you the tone of each syllable, but this information doesn’t help you if you don’t understand what ‘high’ and ‘low’ sound like or how to “sing” them properly. I spent a few hours last Sunday learning the Thai script only to realize it’s a waste of time if my goal is to be able to speak a little bit of Thai by the end of the week.

I’m a visual learner and I like writing so it was hard to say goodbye to those letters, but it was clear that I had to try something else.

On Monday, I went on YouTube and started watching videos like “25 most useful Thai phrases for beginners” on-loop (“Will you marry me?” was on that list, by the way), straining to hear the subtle differences between the various tones. I repeated words with my eyes closed trying to engage whatever part of my brain was responsible for auditory learning.

I got to the point of being able to tell the difference between tones (yay!) and could understand some simple sentences, but no matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t able to hold those words in my active memory for more than 30 seconds. So, I could understand and repeat out loud the sentence like “I eat rice” but one minute later I could not for the life of me remember any of the tones.

By the end of the day, the part of my brain that’s responsible for auditory learning was sore but I still didn’t know where it was or how to reliably retrieve those words that I absolutely needed to be able to say by the end of the week.

On Tuesday, by some miracle, I finally found a video that explains how to practice tones if you’re an English speaker (this one if you’re curious), and it forever changed me. I took the train to Tel Aviv and “sang” Thai words under my breath all the way there. Alarming other passages. (I’m kidding. Nothing alarms people here anymore. Not even the sound of sirens.)

It felt so great to finally get it that I decided to ditch auditory learning and go back to writing words down: color-coded and sorted into five columns by tone (falling, low, mid, rising high) to help me remember them.

Like this:

Before going to bed that day, I told Google Translate, in Thai, “I’m going to bed now” and oh my god oh my god it understood me!

I slept well for the first time in three days.

On Wednesday morning I woke up craving Thai words. I reached for my phone and told my friend Google Translate, “My name is Tanya” in Thai.

But this time around it didn’t go so well:

I urgently needed to talk to actual Thai speakers so I found an app called HelloTalk where you can practice speaking (or writing) your chosen language with native speakers.

I spent the whole day on my phone, trying to convince people on HelloTalk that I don’t “fight to take lethal drugs” and listening to lessons on ThaiPod101 (where I was being taught how to say “How do you get to the Thailand Insurance Building?” on my second Absolute Beginner lesson.)

I raised my head only occasionally to briefly scan the headlines ( “Opinion: US is helping Iran destroy Israel”…. “The hostage deal is delayed”…. “Iran says the conflict will expand…”) and then quickly dive back into Thai because as painful as it was, what I was trying to do, the reality was ten thousand times more painful.

And maybe this was the whole point the entire time: make it as intense as possible to drown out all other pain.

By Wednesday evening, I finally felt that I’d mastered the tones, even if I was still “singing” my sentences like a shy 9-year-old at her vocal recital.

In fact, I’d mastered them so well that I ran into a strange new problem: I now sometimes remembered the “tune” of a particular phrase or sentence but not the lyrics.

On Thursday, when Maya and I went to buy sufganiyot (Hanukkah donuts), I asked for a plastic bag, saying efshar tik? (אפשר תיק?) using the Hebrew word tik which refers to an actual bag as opposed to a plastic bag. It’s not a kind of mistake that I tend to make but I guess that’s what happens when you’re trying to learn two new languages at once: Your other languages start fighting, like older siblings, trying to win back your attention after the arrival of these new babies.

The good news is that once you master the tones, Thai is a pretty easy language. There are no special forms for past and future tense or to mark first/second/third person, so you can just go ahead and use your words the way you memorized them. To make my day even brighter, I found out that to form adverbs from adjectives you sometimes duplicate the adjective (so, ช้า cháa means ‘slow’ and cháa-cháa means ‘slowly’). Sometimes. Not always. But it still made me happy.

On Friday evening, in our dog park, all of us crowded around someone’s phone watching intently as the first group of hostages was transferred into Red Cross’s vehicles, then into Egypt, and finally into Israel. We all cried tears of relief seeing those kids, mothers, and grandmothers finally come back to us safe and sound.

And I breathed my own sigh of relief because I knew that if someone sent me to a pet store in Bangkok the next day, I might just come back with the right kind of animal.

I got all excited at first but then I remembered how my brother told me that at least in China, when people compliment your language skills it usually means they don’t want to offend you by saying they couldn’t understand what the heck you just said.