Excuse Me, Do You Speak Robot?

Since this post is only thoughts and not about any specific event, I have included random pictures that never made it on here, including plenty of waterfall shots (top at Chae Son National Park and the others from Chiang Mai) and Emily and I with the cast of Pan’s play, Baan Saitong.

Learning a new language is not easy, so we never expected to be speaking fluent Thai after only 5 months in Thailand. And although we have picked up a bunch of words (although mostly related to food because we are always eating) and have moved on to making sentences, we are having some serious struggles. At first we were really frustrated by the poor English abilities of our students, thinking how at their age we knew French, which we had also been taking since elementary school, much better than they know English. Trying to learn Thai has given us a much better understanding of how hard it is for them, though. Besides the fact that Thai has a totally different alphabet, with 44 consonants and 22 vowels, most of their sounds do not directly correspond to the sounds of our letters. For example, the Thai language has a character that corresponds to the sound “ng” in English, which is a sound that is extremely difficult for an English speaker to say at the beginning of a word (try saying “nguang”, or elephant trunk), while our “x” does not correspond to any of the Thai characters, and is therefore almost impossible for Thais to say. There are also characters that correspond to two sounds in our alphabet. For example, there is one that corresponds to both v and w. So although v and w sound totally different in English, when speaking Thai you can choose either sound to make in place of the character. Therefore, a van becomes a “wan,” and this always cracks us up.

The Thai language also has no articles, does not conjugate its verbs, and allows for speaking in fragments. Therefore, it makes sense that the students say things like “I rides bike to school.” When you want to say a sentence in French, it is possible, although usually not perfectly correct, to translate each English word into French. This excludes word-order problems, which also occur in Thai (adjectives also go after nouns). In spoken Thai, fragments are the normal way of speaking, so if you translate each word from English you will sound completely ridiculous. For example, if you want to ask someone if they are enjoying their food all you say is “Arroy, mai?” or “Delicious, no?” At first, we thought that people were speaking to us like this so that it would be easier for us to understand, but then we realized that everyone does it. Try as I might to learn how to speak in full sentences, it just isn’t necessary. I want to sound like a Thai-speaking expert when someone asks me if I had a nice weekend by saying, “Yes, I had a great time!” (in Thai) but all I need to say is “Sanook, sanook!” or “Fun, fun”.

You would think that we’d gain confidence in our Thai speaking after learning a couple words and phrases, but just because you know how to say something in Thai does not mean you are saying it so that a Thai person can actually understand you. This brings us to the topic of tones. Oh tones, you will be the death of me! Thai is a tonal language, meaning that every Thai syllable has one of five tones: low, middle, high, rising, or falling, which determine their meaning. This does not seem very important since every syllable in English technically has a correct tone, but if said wrong can usually still be understood. In Thai, a mispronounced tone usually means you are saying another word altogether, since many Thai words are only one syllable. For example, the Thai word “pa” can mean 5 different things when said in each of the 5 tones, either: to throw away, forest, aunt, or two ways of saying Dad. Although it’s exciting to learn a new word, we will most likely use the wrong tone and be misunderstood when trying to use it. For example, soi said in a rising tone means beautiful, but when said in a middle tone, which is flat, can mean bad luck, which is not something you want to refer to in Thailand, where everyone is superstitious and lottery tickets are sold on every street corner. The most frustrating thing about the tones is that they are barely audible to the English-speaking ear. When we hear Lun use a word at dinner that we don’t know, we will repeat it, exactly as she said it (or so we think) and she will say, “No, no, like this” and repeat exactly what we thought we just said. But no, the tone is different. We feel like we are deaf when Lun says a word, we repeat after her, she repeats again, and we, again, repeat it wrong.

Although mastering tones is very important to becoming a fluent Thai speaker, we have also learned that honing your robot-speaking skills is valuable. Speaking Robot simply means making your voice sound exactly like a robot’s, with no stresses, tones, or emotion. When we first went to visit Jessie in Chiang Rai she had told us that the only way a tuk-tuk driver could understand the name of her school (Rong Rian Chulabporn) to take her home was if she spoke Robot, which she demonstrated for us. We laughed and were sure that she must be exaggerating, but soon found out that she was not. The next time we went to visit her we had to catch our own tuk-tuk to her school. When we said the name to the driver he looked at us puzzled and shook his head. Since we knew the school was well-known and not very far away, we kept repeating the name. He called over the other tuk-tuk drivers so they could all listen and laugh at the supposedly non-existant place that we wanted to go. Then we got Jessie on the phone to attempt the pronunciation, but with no luck. Frustrated, Emily jokingly said to me in perfect Robot: “Rong Rian Chulabporn”, and suddenly one of the tuk-tuk drivers turned around and goes, “Oh!! You want Rong Rian Chulaporn!!”…umm yeah, isn’t that what we were saying!? Robot doesn’t only work for the Chulabporn School but also for other words, because another friend reported success speaking Robot near Bangkok.

Since our Thai is not coming along as quickly as we may have liked, when we are with the Thai English teachers they always speak English with us, with sporadic attempts at teaching us Thai. Although, for Thais, they are exceptionally good at English, things still get lost in translation…and mostly with Pan. I will add that we fully understand that we are the ones who came to a foreign country and can barely speak baby-talk in its language, and therefore do not expect superb English out of people who do not need it to survive. We simply find humor in the confusion that can occur when English and Thai come face to face. The most notable mix-up occurred one night when Pan, as she often does, dropped us off at Big C (Thai Walmart) to entertain ourselves while she went home to rest and change before the night’s events. She was taking us to see some sort of singing and dancing performance at her daughter’s high school. Sometimes when she drops us at Big C she expects us to get dinner without her and sometimes we aren’t supposed to because we are going out to dinner with her after. So when we got in the car we asked her if we should get dinner and she said something unclear like, “Yes, you two will eat together.” Just to clarify we asked if she would be eating with us, and we thought she said no. She also said that she would pick us back up at 6:30, and with the performance beginning at 7:00 we thought this was only further evidence that we were supposed to eat without her. But when Pan picked us up and drove us to a place that wasn’t a school, Emily turned to me and said, “Soooo, I don’t think we were supposed to eat.” Then we felt bad because Pan had to eat alone while we just stared at her (we had eaten both a large dinner and dessert so we couldn’t even attempt eating again just to be polite). We tried to explain how we misunderstood her, and she said it was fine, but in reality she was probably thinking, “Wow, they are slow”.

Overall, our communication with Thais is often blurry, but hand motions and slow-mo speaking seem to do the trick most of the time…and getting used to Thai is difficult because we are used to speaking in full, grammatically correct sentences as to not sound stupid in English. We are learning though, and it’s slowly slipping into our English, so don’t be surprised when we come home sounding like toddlers.

I will leave you with the fun fact that there is a Thai vegetable that’s name is pronounced the same as the “F word” in English…always makes us leap and go “What did you say?” whenever we hear it.

Until next time…and keep practicing your Robot if you ever want to visit.