Thai Language Lessons

We've finally started learning the language! We have a tutor who comes to our house three times a week. Every Monday, Thursday, and Friday she spends an hour with the three girls, then two hours with Tim and me. I taught her the idiom "like drinking from a fire hose"-- that's exactly what these lessons are.

I am SO glad Tim and I learned the Thai alphabet on our own before starting lessons. We used two different resources for that: Manee and Friends and this Android app. Both have been incredibly helpful. Manee and Friends is like a Thai Dick and Jane, a beginning reader that used to be commonly used in Thai schools. Apparently it's been out of print for many years, but someone has used it to make a 22-lesson website complete with audio. The app, called "Thai Script," is fantastic. I have no idea if it's available for iWhatever.

The girls are enjoying their classes so far. They are learning basic conversational Thai and beginning to learn writing the Thai letters. The Thai alphabet is kind of complicated. There are 44 consonants, though a few of them aren't used anymore. Vowels... it depends on how you count them. There are 15 different symbols, but they can be combined to make over 28 different sounds. But again, I think some aren't used. Vowels can be placed before, after, above, or below a consonant--or a combination of before, after, and/or above. Oh, and then there are four tone marks. And just to make it extra interesting, there are no spaces between words.

Every consonant has a "thing" that goes with it. So for example, ก is the first letter of the alphabet. When used in a word it's pronounced roughly "Gaw." Its name,  ก ไก่, is pronounced "gaw-gai" (more or less, it's hard to equate it to English sounds). "Gai" means chicken, so it would be like saying A-apple for the first letter of the English alphabet. 

Today the girls were learning to write the letter ค, the object for which is water buffalo (khaw-kwai). So this is what we came up with: 

I've pared down some of our other homeschool subjects so I can spend more time on Thai with the girls (and on my own). It's a constant balancing act! We've scaled back to doing copywork in place of most of our language arts subjects. It's a great way to teach and reinforce proper grammar, spelling, mechanics, and syntax. For right now I'm using George Washington's "Rules of Civility." It fits right in with our American history studies, and they're great little sayings to live by! Today's sentence: 

When in company, put not your hands to any part of the body, not usually discovered.

Good advice, no? ;-) 

The post that took three times as long as it should have

I thought that once we got here, I'd be blogging all the time. There'd be so many fascinating stories to tell, amazing pictures to share, I'd never run out of great material. It hasn't quite been like that.

It seems like a lot of our time has been taken up with just... figuring things out. How to buy a car. How to rent a house. How to drive. How (and where) to shop. Everything has a learning curve to it. And there's a basic rule of thumb here that everything will take about three times as long as you think it should, whether that's paying a bill or picking up groceries.

But I do feel like we're getting settled in, slowly. I was able to sign the girls up for a gymnastics class which was a huge triumph. That was something we'd talked about before we even moved here, thinking that in Thailand it would be more affordable than in the U.S. It took us a couple of months, but I finally found out about a class that had been arranged for expat kids and was able to get the girls into it two days a week. They love it! The gym is less than 7 km away from us, only about a 20 minute drive to get there. Getting home takes much longer, sometimes up to 45 minutes. Not only do we have to deal with rush-hour traffic getting home, but there are loads of one-way streets all over Chiang Mai. Sometimes we have to drive several kilometers in order to turn around and get going the right way! Everything goes the right way for getting to the gym, but getting home... not so much. :)

Traffic engineering here can really boggle the mind sometimes. There are some things that are great, like underpasses for through traffic at busy intersections. Other things are insane, like what I call The Roundabout from Hell. This is a roundabout that I approach from the east. My destination is a driveway that is on the north side of the roundabout. The challenge (aside from the normal challenges of Thai driving--like nebulous lanes and motorcycles zipping around like mosquitoes) is that oncoming traffic really doesn't enter the roundabout. The eastbound lanes just go straight, with the roundabout sticking out like a growth. They don't need to slow down or merge at all. I need to cross that traffic to get to the driveway, without getting rear-ended by the cars behind me that are continuing westbound or the ones coming in from the street that joined the roundabout from the south (especially those that are continuing around to the east), or cutting off any motorcycles that were planning on staying to my right while going through to the west. Fun times. I get to do this twice a week, as that's the entrance to the stadium complex where the gymnastics classes are held.

I would add a picture to this post, but the internet's running slowly today and the upload would take three times as long as it should.