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.