Yesterday was a huge accomplishment for me in my study of Thai. I stopped by to see a friend in her office, and then headed up to my classroom to teach my last class of the morning. By the time I got up the stairs I had an email from her. When I opened it, it was short, but entirely in Thai! I was pretty surprised. She speaks only English with me and our conversation hadn't even been about language. Wow, I thought, she must be trying to challenge my Thai and see what I can do! So I read through it and was able to make out all of it but one bit. One syllable I could tell was the sound "nay" but I had no idea what it meant. So I could get the entire second thing she said but only about half of the first line because of the word "nay".
I wrote back telling her I was a bit confused and explaining which bits I understood and which bits I did not. Turns out she was trying to send the email to someone else (a Thai)! And I understood it! Today I asked her what the nay was. Turns out it was the first part of the word "nation" referring to a building near campus called the Nation Building. I got the "chan" part, but chan has a meaning on it's own- though it's spelled differently from the "chan" sound in nation, I couldn't tell since my Thai spelling is nonexistent. Just working on speaking and listening and reading for now. Once I knew the word nation, I understood the entire email :) All two lines of it anyway!
And if you hadn't noticed, I'm feeling pretty proud of that :)
No comments:
Post a Comment