How I (Maybe) Learned Thai in one Week (and Nearly Prevented an Intergalactic War) - PART 2

A Linguistic Thriller - Part 2 out of 3

I genuinely think that the main obstacles to learning a language are psychological. We’re all serious and respectful grown-up people with grown-up careers and we are afraid to make mistakes.

But learning a new language is like being a child again and learning how to speak. So I say, don’t be afraid to make a fool of yourself when you just start speaking. If people laugh at you because you said something ridiculous - so be it, you made someone’s day AND you practiced speaking a new language.

The only exception to this rule is if the native speaker you’re going to talk to has just narrowly survived a massacre. In that case, your adorable language blunders are unlikely to put a smile on their face.

That was my limitation a few weeks ago when I challenged myself to learn Thai in a week so I could talk to a badly injured monolingual Thai person in the hospital.

READ THE FIRST PART OF THIS STORY HERE

As soon as I started mastering the five tones, I started taking cautious steps towards building simple sentences, focusing on things that I thought I might have to say when I came to visit him.

I practiced saying them to Google Translate to make sure I wasn’t saying something outrageous.

Quite often I was, though:

These were definitely not the things I wanted to be saying when I came into a badly injured person’s hospital room.

Neither were these:

Sometimes, Google Translate and I played a guessing game. I would tell it the same phrase over and over again to see how many times it got it right. 

Google Translate usually lost:

Maybe I shouldn’t say my name at all, I decided. Because it’s a freaking minefield.

One thing was clear: Somchai couldn’t be the first Thai person I ever talked to.

Some languages you can learn without ever needing to interact with a native speaker. If it was Italian, I’d feel confident learning it without any speaking practice.

But tonal languages are different.

So I went on HelloTalk and practiced saying things in Thai to Thai people. It wasn’t just helpful for listening and speaking practice. People gave me important cultural tips. For instance, it turns out I’m supposed to add “phee” in front of my name when introducing myself. It means something like “older sister” and is the polite way to introduce yourself if you’re talking to someone younger than yourself because respect for elders is important in Thai culture.

Was Somchai younger than me? I had no idea. He probably was. Lots of people are, lately. I started adding “phee” in front of my name, even though I wasn’t at all convinced that what followed was actually my name, and also, how much respect can you feel towards a person who comes into your hospital room and asks “Are you a giant like Tony?”

I started thinking about what I would need to say to Somchai.

I will introduce myself. I’ll say my Thai isn’t great because I’m still learning but I saw Koby’s Facebook post and I thought I’d visit him. I’ll ask him how he is doing and if he needs anything.

Maybe he’ll want to tell me what happened, maybe he won’t. 

Maybe he’ll want to complain about the hospital food (aa-hǎan “food”, gík gáawk “bad”).

I’ll ask him about his life, how long has he been in Israel? Does he have family in Thailand? How are they doing?  (mee “have”, lôok lôok “kids”, khrâawp khruaa “family”)

We’ll talk and he will feel a little bit less lonely.

It won’t be perfect, I will say some things incorrectly but he’ll understand most of the time. I will not tell him that I only started learning a few days ago because it sounds crazy and maybe creepy. He will breathe a sigh of relief because wow here is someone he can finally talk to in his language.

Maybe he’ll ask about my life, what I do and how come I speak Thai.

Before leaving I’ll say I’m happy to come again. Maybe I will come and visit him again the next day as well (chǎn maa phrûng níi dâai ká ‘I can come tomorrow’).

Maybe we will keep in touch even after he goes back to Thailand. Maybe it will develop into a lifelong friendship. Maybe I will visit Thailand one day and he’ll show me around. And he’ll be like ‘Oh this is the woman who came to visit me that time when I was in the hospital all alone in a foreign country.’

Maybe our grandkids will fall in love and get married. 

By Thursday of that week, I finally felt confident about the five tones. Google Translate now understood me with increasing regularity. I knew how to form simple sentences and ask yes/no questions and wh-questions and was steadily increasing my vocabulary.

Also, I realized we didn’t have any food in the house, because I didn't have the time to go get groceries or the presence of mind to order them online. When after another Google Translate fuckup I had a sudden hunger attack, I discovered that the closest thing to food in our house was carrots.

I ate three. Carrots. 

If languages were hiking trails, then Finnish is that trail that starts deceptively easy —because the phonology (the sound system) is pretty straightforward so you can start saying simple sentences right away — and then begins a steady incline that lasts forever. That’s because, in addition to several verb tenses, it has fifteen noun cases, that is 15 different forms that each noun can take depending on its role in a sentence. It’s an incline that I’m still very much climbing.

Thai, on the other hand, is like that insane trail where you immediately come face to face with a 90-degree climb. But once you climb it (if you climb it), the rest of the trail is pretty flat.

That’s because Thai is what linguists call an “analytic” language, meaning a language where each word consists of one piece that doesn’t change no matter what.

The opposite of ‘analytic language’ is a ‘synthetic’ language. (Don’t worry there is nothing environmentally unfriendly about synthetic languages, they’re just as good for you AND the planet as analytic ones.)

In a synthetic language, you add lots of different bits to the verb to show whether the action happened in the past or future, who the subject is, and so on.

Spanish is a synthetic language. So, in the word hablabamos ‘we used to speak’ habla is the verb ‘speak’, -ba- means that the action took place in the distant past, and -mos indicates ‘first person plural we’.

Finnish is like a synthetic language on steroids.

By Friday that week, I felt that I’d climbed the mountain of the Thai tones and reached the flat part of the trail. Sure there was still the occasional Google Translate fuck up, but then it didn’t always understand me in English either.

But then why was I feeling so increasingly shitty?

Because it occurred to me that I wasn’t going there to talk about myself. Sure, I could now say pretty much anything in Thai, by what’s the point if I won’t be able to understand anything he says? My listening skills were pretty much non-existent. To develop listening skills, you have to listen. A lot. And acquire a lot of vocabulary. All of this takes time. Time that I didn’t have.

But it wasn’t just that.

Now that the adrenaline of having to learn a new language in a week had worn off, I remembered a tiny little detail: I don’t even like talking to people. I’m not the sort of big-hearted, extroverted person who goes around helping people all day, talking to them and listening to them. I’m an extreme introvert. I have no idea how to start conversations with strangers or keep them going. I find it excruciatingly difficult to open my mouth and have a casual conversation with another parent on a playground. I’d rather wash the floors or pack boxes as part of my volunteering, not talk to people.

Unless my language learning skills are called to save the planet from an intergalactic war, I’d be happy to never say a single word again out loud, in any language.

So I’ll walk in, say hello, introduce myself, and then what? We’ll sit there in awkward silence for the next ten minutes? Also, the person has been through hell. What on earth do you think he’s going to talk to you about? Why do you think he’ll want to tell you his story (even assuming you were able to understand it)?

I decided that the only solution (if I want to see this whole thing through) is to have low expectations. Also, I started hoping that Koby F. wouldn’t be there when I got there. I had told Koby that I spoke ‘basic Thai’ but Somchai didn’t know that. Somchai didn’t even know I was coming. 

TO BE CONTINUED