ABC's

So the Thai alphabet has 44 consonants (two of which are no longer in use; what a relief that is, and I’m only being half sarcastic, every little bit helps) and including dipthongs, around 28 vowels.  It gets worse from there.  The consonants are divided into 3 classes, low, middle, and high.  Each syllable of a word is considered “live” or dead” depending on whether it has a long or short vowel or ends with certain consonants (but not all).  And the tone of the syllable depends on which class the beginning consonant is, whether the vowel is long or short, and whether the syllable is “live” or “dead.”  Oh, and did I mention that there are also tone markers?  And that they change which tone they specify depending on the consonant class?  This means that although there are only 5 tones, in a way there are 17 different possibilities for any given syllable.

So, the statement “Now I know my ABC’s” is quite a claim in Thai.  I won’t even get into the other spelling and reading challenges, such as silent letters (which sometimes change the tone), or vowels that change their form depending on whether they are followed by a consonant or not, or the fact that some vowels are written after the consonant, some before, some above, some below, and some in two or more places, or that there is no space between words and no final sentence punctuation.  Give me Korean any day of the week!

My host family has been very gamely trying to help me learn to read, although there’s not a lot of language-teaching experience among them, so generally the session goes something like as follows:

Host Father: “Gaw – A = GA (mid tone)”

Me: “GA”

Host Father: “Right.  Kaw – A = KA (mid tone)”

Me: “KA”

Host Father: “Ch – euu = Cheuu (mid tone); mai ek = Cheuu (falling tone)

This can go on for quite some time.

I had started learning the alphabet during PST (pre-service training), but continuing it on my own is definitely more challenging.  I think I’ve almost got the consonants down in terms of what sound they make, what they’re called, and how to write them (like a kindergardener).  Now it’s on to the vowels and tone markers and rules.