On one of my visits to Thailand in the late 90s I purchased a Thai language beginner’s book along with the accompanying audio tapes. I studied the book with great diligence and listened to the cassette tapes in my car over and over and over again every day on my way to and from work. 

But I soon learned, on subsequent visits to Thailand, that nothing I learned seemed to work. I still couldn’t understand what people were saying and when I tried to speak, no one understood me.

I didn’t know then but subsequently figured out two very important things:

- The Thai language found in most books and lessons bears little resemblance to the Thai language used in every day speech. (This is probably true of most language learning aids.)

- Thai is precisely pronounced. Get it even a little bit wrong and you’re dead.

I also figured out much later that I had made two horrible decisions with respect to my Thai language studies:

- I decided to not learn the Thai script right away but to rely on the romanizations found in almost every book.

- I decided to ignore the tones. Thai is a tonal language. The tones were and are very, very hard for me. I assumed that even if I used the wrong tone, Thai speakers would be able to use context and logic to figure out what I was saying. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

At The Mall - Buying New Year Cards

So, I'm at The Mall the other day looking to buy New Year Cards, a Thai tradition. The Mall has recently been remodeled, so nothing is where it was a year ago. I'm wandering around the stationery department looking for greeting cards when one of the clerks asks what I'm looking for.

I reply การ์ดปีใหม่ (kard pi mai) which translates directly as "card year new" which, I think, is what you call a New Year Card in Thai.

I might as well have asked for tickets to La Traviata. He had no idea what I wanted.

After a bit he figured out that I wanted some sort of greeting card, but the New Year part never sunk in. Now, I don't know how many words there are in Thai that sound like "pi mai", but I don't think it's too many. Hey, I'm in the stationery department looking for greeting cards and the New Year is coming up and I say a word that is close (maybe) to the Thai word for New Year. Isn't that enough?

No. Finally he leads me to the greeting card section where I immediately find the New Year cards to which I point. He goes, "Ah, pi mai". Yep.

So, after nearly 12 years in Thailand I still can't ask for a bloody greeting card. Hence this blog.

Farang Can't Learn Thai - Introduction

In my relatively long life I have tried to learn five different foreign (non-English) languages: 

• Spanish - I grew up in Southern California, so I was surrounded by Spanish. I took a year in Junior High, another year in High School and two years at university. After all that; zilch. I’ve never had a conversation with anyone in Spanish. 
• Chuukese (Trukese) - I went into the Peace Corps right after university and spent three months in training. That included intensive language study five days a week, four hours a day. Once again, a big fat zero. The only two things I could ever say were, “Happy Turtle” and “Please pass the salt”. Neither phrase ever came in handy. 
• Chamorro - I lived on Saipan for 26 years. Chamorro is the language spoken by every indigenous person. (Some also speak Carolinian which is much like Chuukese - see above.) I heard spoken Chamorro every day. I studied books. I watched videos. I never could understand or speak even a tiny bit of Chamorro. 
• Japanese - Beginning in the 1980s I started visiting Japan quite often. I decided to learn some Japanese. I bought books. I watched video tapes. I learned to read the Japanese syllabaries - Katakana and Hiragana. I learned about 200 Kanji (Chinese) characters. I figured out how to use a Japanese dictionary. I can get by as a tourist in Japan; read a simple menu, decipher signs, etc. But, I never got to the point where I could converse in Japanese. 
• Thai - In the 1990s I started visiting Thailand regularly; mostly to scuba dive but also to see the country and it’s neighbors. I decided to study Thai. Another bust. I moved permanently to Thailand in 2005. I have been through dozens and dozens of books and learning systems. I learned the Thai alphabet and how to read. But, to this day, after spending thousands of dollars and thousands of hours, I understand almost nothing that I hear and my pronunciation is so bad that pretty much no one understands anything that I say. 

 This is the story of my adventure with the Thai language.