Language Learning

I started Thai lessons last week. My khruu, or teacher, is a young married guy named Tong. I finally learned some much needed phrases like "what is this?" so now I can go around learning Thai anywhere I go. This past weekend I walked down to the old city: the part of the city that existed before industrialization, it has a wall and moat around it; however the wall has long since crumbled and the moat now has fountains in it. I suppose that's what industrialization does. The city has sprawled much farther than the reaches of the wall, but the old city retains a much different atmosphere; hence why I like walking around there.

Anyway, this particular weekend I decided to sit down outside a museum to write in my journal. Eventually a teenage girl walked up to me to "ask a few questions". I found out later from Melinda that this probably meant she was taking English in school and probably had an assignment to go find some farang to talk to. We ended up talking for over an hour. She taught me the hours of the day (which are actually quite complicated) and a few other useful things like "knife". I taught her some useless things like how to say "y'all" with a southern drawl. I might have taught her something else, but the point is that I was a good conversation partner! Her name was tangmo, which actually means "watermelon". Now, when a Thai tells you what their name is, they're actually telling you their nickname. Real names are much longer and hardly ever used. I'm told that these nicknames also serve as pronouns, so they're usually short one or two syllable words that are usually assigned in the first few years of their life (but not at birth).

For lunch we typically cross the street and eat at Eddie's, a nice 20 baht restaurant that has good kraphao. If I'm in need of change for the songthao I usually go to the grocery store and get some ice cream to quench the burn from the kraphao. This week was a week of daring change so I bought a bag of rambutan. On my first attempt I didn't know how much it was going to cost because fruit is sold by the kilo. I ended up breaking a 1000 baht bill on 2 baht worth of rambutan. So that was strike one for me.

The next day I decided that I didn't like the extra grocery bag that they gave me, so I pointed at the bags and said, "nii arai khrup", which was supposed to mean "what is this", but judging from the look on her face I'd guess that I got a tone or vowel wrong (strike two). It turns out that a bag is called a thoong. So today I used my new knowledge: "mai thoong khrup", which was supposed to mean "no bag please" but, as I now know, I actually said something more along the lines of "that's no good" or "that's not cheap" with a very rude style (strike three, now I have nothing to lose).

Dear cashier-at-Tesco-Lotus-who-is-working-tomorrow, please forgive me when I attempt to say "mai aaw thoong", which is supposed to be correct grammar. I'll probably mess up a tone or vowel. Please be gentle on me.