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เรื่องกินเรื่องใหญ่ Lesson 2

August 10, 2008 9:51 am Ben Thai Language Lessons

Yesterday I had the second private lesson towards the new Thai competency test. First, I handed in my homework assignment and my teacher corrected it. Some of it sounded a little bit unnatural so was reworded, but nothing major.

We then, as we had previously decided, started going through the old course books from the school that I had used in my first month of study there (I had skipped the first 4 modules so this was module 5).

Module 5 at the school is basically reading comprehension; a collection of short stories, mostly connected to Thai culture with titles such as “The Weekend Market”, “The Chaophraya River” etc.

Back when I studied them the first time we would read one over about 5 hours, stopping to discuss the texts and the vocabulary and grammatical structures within them. Yesterday we read four of them:

ผลไม้ไทย Thai Fruit

กล้วย Bananas

ข้าวและชาวนา Rice and Farmers

ชีวิตตามลำน้ำ Life Along the Waterways

You’ll notice a slight culinary theme to most of the topics, hence the title of this post, เรื่องกินเรื่องใหญ่ rêuang gin rêuang yài meaning, basically, The issue of eating is a big issue. You might also wonder why they included a story about bananas, but if you take a look at this website you’ll realise the importance of this particular fruit in Thai culture.

As we read through the texts, my teacher asked me questions and we chatted about the various issues that came up. After she asked me what was the first thing I thought of when I thought of bananas and I said studying Thai, we talked about the seemingly over importance that Thais place on food in general conversation.

I mentioned that I used to find it strange when eating a very common dish and being asked the inevitable question อร่อยไหม aroi maai. I explained that back home if I was eating, say a cheese sandwich or a packet of crisps, it would be unlikely that a friend would ask. She, of course, found this unusual but amusing, and this is when I got the title for this post.

So a tip for today, if you find yourself eating, say a banana, and you’re getting frustrated with all the questions, you can say, “ก็เป็นกล้วย” well, it’s (just) a banana.