WHEN YOU BUY SOMETHING IN THAILAND, YOU MIGHT ASK, “RAK-KAH, tow-rai?” Which means, “How much is it?” So long as you really drag out and swoop the o in “tow” from high to low, and roll your r’s so they almost sound like l’s, you stand a pretty decent chance of being understood. But since you have very little chance of understanding the answer you’ll receive, you might consider following up automatically with “Dai-mai kee-an long hai?” Which means, “Could you please write it down?” At least that’s what our little Thai phrase book said.
I was practicing these two sentences in preparation for a trip to the market when Por, our teacher friend from school, dropped by. Por spoke the best English in the village and was constantly asking me for help with her pronunciation. When I asked her to give me some feedback on the Thai I was working on, she was thrilled to switch roles.
“Dai-mai kee-an long hai?” I said, proud of myself and expecting approval. Por just stared at me, not a single glimmer of comprehension on her face. I tried again, less certain. “Dai-mai kee-an long hai?” Nothing. At this point I just figured—as I’ve always known—that I suck at this, and all, languages. So rather than prolong my listener’s confusion, I showed her the book with the phrase printed out in Thai characters. Right away she understood.
“Oh,” she said. “Iss not right. You say: ‘long hai.’ But iss: ‘long hai.’ ”
That was it. My hai swooped down. Her hai swooped way up. Everything else was fine but she’d understood none of it.
Such is the way with Thai. In tonal languages, inflection is critical. Take for example the word mai (pronounced my). If you say it flat, it means “mile.” Say it low, it means “new.” Say it high, it means “right?” Swoop it from low to high, it means “silk.” And if you swoop it from high to low, it can actually mean two things: the most basic word, “no,” or the verb “to burn.” Sheesh. What if you want to say “We don’t want to burn a mile of new silk, right?” It boggles the mai-nd.
At first, I found all this high and low stuff to be ridiculous. I mean, come on: One wrong swoop and you can’t understand anything I’m saying? But then I had a chat with a local girl named Bè-oh and I realized communication is tricky no matter what language you’re using.
It was after a Buddhist ceremony that we all attended in the next town over. In honor of the day the Buddha reached his enlightenment, some local monks were saying prayers and passing out blessings. Food was prepared. Everyone in the area turned up. When the monks finished chanting and the crowd began to head home, I took a walk through the town, just looking around. As I came to a corner, Bè-oh was standing by the road and she called to me.
“Tee-cha, tee-cha,” she said.
“Hello. Bè-oh. How. Are. You?” I asked.
“Am fine, sank you,” she said. “Where you go?”
“I. Am. Walking,” I answered. “What. Are. You. Doing. Today?”
Bè-oh’s face flashed concern. Quickly, she opened the English book she was holding. She was probably thirteen, but her book was a first-grade reader. Still, she flipped though the pages, wanting to answer me, desperately looking for the words.
“It’s. Okay,” I said. “No problem.”
But Bè-oh kept looking. She flipped faster, glanced up at me, more pages, more glancing, then she made a decision and took a shot.
“When do we go … abore?” she said.
She smiled. I smiled. But I had no idea what she meant. Her smile dimmed and she looked down, reading more carefully. “When do we go abore?”
Wanting her to succeed but still totally lost, I stepped closer and took a look at her book. The page she had decided upon was titled “Transportation” and the first line was printed under a picture of a plane. “When do we go aboard?” it said.
I have no idea why she chose that particular sentence. Obviously she didn’t understand the question. Or maybe she just panicked. Whatever the reason, I gave her an A for effort, knowing firsthand how stressful it can be to try at all.
Even nonverbal communication proved to be a challenge in Thailand. There was a seventy-five-year-old man named Paa who acted as a caretaker for our property. He was a small man with a deeply wrinkled face, neatly combed silver hair, and a gentle smile. I’m not sure exactly what Paa did at the house when we weren’t around, but I usually found him sitting out on the front patio, dressed in shorts and a tank top, resting in a large carved teak chair that looked like a throne. I tried to talk to him from time to time but Paa spoke no English at all. So once my limited Thai skills were used up (which didn’t take long), we’d resort to pantomime. The problem was, at least as far as I could tell, that Paa’s signs and gestures were mostly random. He’d hold up two fingers, point to me, put his hands on his hips, pretend to be reading a book, throw a few punches, hold up one finger, answer an imaginary phone, dig with an imaginary shovel, point at me, and then wait for my reply. Completely lost, I usually just threw a few punches and dug a few holes myself. In this way we passed the time.
When I was in eighth grade, I got a D+ in Mademoiselle Gosselin’s French 2 class. It would prove to be the lowest grade of my academic career, and it says something about my ability to grasp foreign languages. It’s not just that I find them difficult, which I do. I’m simply not all that interested. Whereas Traca is fascinated and motivated by the challenge a new language presents, the whole process just makes me tired. All those irregular verbs, the masculine-and-feminine nonsense, the future tenses. I’d rather just take my D+ and go home.
But with Thai—and this came as a total shock to me—I was actually having fun learning a language for the first time in my life. I can’t explain it. Maybe because it was so impossible, because I was so certain to fail, I just relaxed and made a game out of it. I don’t know. It really didn’t even feel like a language to me. It was more like a random string of sounds that meant nothing unless I related them to word pictures in my mind.
And so I pictured a cup of Sour Tea Crap when I needed the Thai greeting for “hello” (Sa-wat dee, krap). Or I pictured a raccoon eating some rye bread when I wanted to ask someone’s name: Kun cheu a-rai? (Coon chew a rye?) Attila the Hun eating his chow reminded me of the Thai word for “breakfast,” ah-hahn chów (a Hun chow). Naturally, potty humor is the most effective way to remember anything, so I’ll never forget the words for “Sunday” (wan a-tít), “butterfly” (pee seu-a, or, to me, “pee sewer” with a bit of a Maine accent), “pink” (see-chom pou: see chomp poo), and the word for “corn”: kau-poon, which sounded enough like “cow porn” to make me smile and spark my memory.
Was it possible to reduce an entire language to a series of ridiculous English word pictures? Probably not. But I had four weeks to try.
Luckily, to say “four weeks” in Thai, you say see a-tít, and who can forget that?