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I speak German and Hungarian, and I'm trying to learn Thai but between lockdown and my age it's going very slowly. I'm properly fluent in German but I learned

by biztos 5y ago

I speak German and Hungarian, and I'm trying to learn Thai but between lockdown and my age it's going very slowly. I'm properly fluent in German but I learned it when I was a teenager and studied German literature at university. Hungarian took me a while (as in years) and there are still bits of it I don't get, but I'm fluent-ish for most practical purposes. It's not an Indo-European language and it has agglutinative grammar and it never had orthographic reform, but it's pretty consistent once you get over the hump, it has a lot of loan words and concepts from German and Slavic languages, and it's a very fun kind of weird. Thai has refreshingly simple grammar but pronunciation is really hard for Westerners as is comprehension, and the writing system is, um, rich in complexity. Most Western expats simply give up, I hope I will not. I have heard Polish is pretty difficult. Native Polish speakers, much like Hungarians, take great pride in the difficulty of their language. AFAICT from spending a lot of time hanging around with natives and learning a few simple sentences, Spanish and Serbian are both pretty "easy" at least up front. I have plans to spend more time in the Canary Islands so I will have to learn some basic Spanish and I do hope it's as easy as it seems.

stephenr 5y ago
> pronunciation is really hard for Westerners as is comprehension Yeah no kidding. I first ran into this with white/rice/? (I forget the third definition of kao). So now whenever my wife/MIL is trying to show me the difference in tone between “different” words like that my response to them is usually “kao, kao, kao”. For anyone who hasn’t tried to learn Thai: a number of words are pronounced almost exactly the same (the way there and their are in English) but with slightly different tone. The example I give above (“kao”) is pronounced basically like cow, but the tone means you’re saying either white, rice (yes white rice technically is kao kao but no one says that) or... something else I still can’t remember. I’ll freely admit I’m quite bad at languages other than English. I didn’t do fantastically when they introduced Japanese at school, and I struggle with Thai a lot, particularly to comprehend native speakers because they typically abbreviate everything and speak very quickly (even to a foreigner with a confused look on his face). Speaking one tiny (and no doubt grammatically imperfect) phrase makes that worse because they assume you’re fluent and speak more/faster. As an example: “thank you” gets shortened from three syllables to one in pretty much every encounter I’ve experienced - even with government officials like police and immigration; the syllable that remains is the last one, which is just a “word” added to make the sentence polite. I wish I spoke more and I am learning bit by bit but even learning through immersion isn’t fast, for me at least.

by biztos 5y ago

stephenr 5y ago

> pronunciation is really hard for Westerners as is comprehension Yeah no kidding. I first ran into this with white/rice/? (I forget the third definition of kao). So now whenever my wife/MIL is trying to show me the difference in tone between “different” words like that my response to them is usually “kao, kao, kao”. For anyone who hasn’t tried to learn Thai: a number of words are pronounced almost exactly the same (the way there and their are in English) but with slightly different tone. The example I give above (“kao”) is pronounced basically like cow, but the tone means you’re saying either white, rice (yes white rice technically is kao kao but no one says that) or... something else I still can’t remember. I’ll freely admit I’m quite bad at languages other than English. I didn’t do fantastically when they introduced Japanese at school, and I struggle with Thai a lot, particularly to comprehend native speakers because they typically abbreviate everything and speak very quickly (even to a foreigner with a confused look on his face). Speaking one tiny (and no doubt grammatically imperfect) phrase makes that worse because they assume you’re fluent and speak more/faster. As an example: “thank you” gets shortened from three syllables to one in pretty much every encounter I’ve experienced - even with government officials like police and immigration; the syllable that remains is the last one, which is just a “word” added to make the sentence polite. I wish I spoke more and I am learning bit by bit but even learning through immersion isn’t fast, for me at least.