My wife is Lao :) Because I'm only semi-fluent (or lets say, I can do my shopping and hold basic small talk in it), I'm not in a good position to do a competent

My wife is Lao :) Because I'm only semi-fluent (or lets say, I can do my shopping and hold basic small talk in it), I'm not in a good position to do a competent comparison. However, I feel is that is a to the point language. There is a fairly good amount of re-use of words. Also, it being tonal you have to be careful because unlike Hindi/Bengali, wrong tone _will_ change the meaning. Thankfully, people on my wife's side are very kind and forgiving so I survive the blunders I do :)