I’m back and I feel bad for not having blogged here for nearly a month but I had relocated home (something my family does all too often) and I’m still waiting for Internet access at home. Anyway, I’ve been reading up on the other blogs and I’m able to write (okay ‘sneak write’ from work) an entry to follow up from my last blog about learning the Thai language.
If you haven’t read part 1, click on the title link to go back to it.
Right, I decided to be creative and try to teach myself Thai. I had already bought two Thai phrasebooks that I would peek into frequently but all the words would always go out of my head as soon as I lay the book down. I started off by writing down the alphabet. To be honest, I was never that good at grammar because when I learnt English, I just picked it up and never went through the first-grade stages of learning what grammar is. So it was always strange for me to start at the very beginning of any language by learning the grammar. I would just dive into vocabulary and sentence structure. For Thai, I couldn’t do that because it was totally different. I thought “how would anyone use 44 consonants and 32 vowels?” It sounded a bit crazy considering that English had just 26 letters and five vowels. But nevertheless, it was unavoidable and I had to make myself learn them. I wrote them down so many times but I couldn’t force myself to know them like the back of my hand as quickly as I would have liked. Instead, I learnt some and quickly went onto verbs and adjectives.
Thai web boards but could only read few words. Some I recognized but most I didn’t have a clue what they were or meant. I made my own Thai language notebook where I wrote down things from phrasebooks (although there are some mistakes – yes somehow I can tell even though I’m still learning).
But what I am quite glad about is when I bought my Thai dictionaries at the Songkran festival earlier this year. It’s annoying that they have to be in separate books but this way they are also compact and they were extremely helpful in looking up words. I happen to use the red one more often which explains the middle crease.
I have a couple more sub-topics to cover on this so pray that I get my Internet back at home soon so I can post them quicker. Till next time na ja ;).
