Back in the Classroom.
August 3, 2008 Thai Language Lessons No CommentsSo, last Friday was my first lesson towards the new test which I will be taking at the end of the year. I have returned to the language school where I previously studied for 5 months full time. This was the same school that my previous teacher came from who prepared me for the P6 exam last year. This time however, I am studying with a different teacher, who actually taught me for 2 of my previous 5 months when I studied ปัญหาสังคม (social problems) and หนังสือพิมพ์ ๒ (newspapers module 2). I remember finding her very helpful and although we didn’t always agree during our discussions of Thai social problems she took our discussions in the best possible way (whilst honing my Thai arguing skills).
What is interesting going back to study after already passing the P6 exam is that the school is now unsure what to do with me. Their whole system is basically built around preparing people for the exam and now having done that it seems to them that I have nothing left to learn. It is also clear that the exam will be slightly different to previous years, but at the moment all the school has to go on is the info I mentioned in my previous post.
Thankfully, I’m not expecting perfection. Just someone who is willing to listen and help. I was glad therefore to see that she had taken my advice of starting off simple and reviewing all the things I have already learned. We spent the first lesson going over book 3 from their course which I had actually skipped when I studied there before. We reviewed the the Thai alphabet which it was clear I was OK with but also discussed some of the rules which although I had taught myself before I had not actually learned in Thai, back when I taught myself how to read.
Two things in particular I found interesting were อักษรนำ which thai-langaguage.com describes here
and คำมูล which the Royal Institute Dictionary defines as follows:
คำมูล น. คําคําเดียวที่ไม่ได้ประสมกับคําอื่น เช่น ยาม แขก นาฬิกา.
(Noun) A single word which isn’t mixed with another word e.g. yaam (time, period) kaek (guest, visitor) naaligaa (watch, clock)
There’s a very good article on this in Thai here which I won’t translate in full but that basically points out the different types of words that fall in to this category. This includes words of one syllable which can be true Thai words and loanwords from other languages e.g. พ่อ Por (father) and ปอนด์ (pound).
It also includes words of more than one syllable where a) none of the syllables have meaning on their own e.g. จิ้งหรีด jîng-rèet (cricket), b) some of the syllables have meaning e.g. กิริยา gì-rí-yaa (manners, verb) only the last syllable here has meaning and finally c) where the word is made up of syllables which have meanings unrelated to the resulting word e.g. นารี naa (farm, field) plus ree (oval) becomes naaree (woman, female).
We didn’t dwell on either subjects in class and it was a nice start to a new series of lessons in that it was very easy going. She set me a short story to write as homework “การเรียนภาษาไทยของผม” and we discussed what we would learn over the next few weeks. We agreed that continuing rapidly through the books I should already know would be a good place to start.
I’ll try to put the homework up here when it’s done and will write again after the next class.
Ben
