Preparing to Crack the Fundamentals

How to prepare for and what to expect from Cracking Thai Fundamentals

by Stuart Jay Raj

One of the questions that I often get asked when opening a workshop like
Cracking Thai Fundamentals is “Do you really think that you can teach me to
speak Thai in 12-16 hours?” The answer of course is an emphatic “NO”. The
Cracking Thai Fundamentals workshop does not promise to have you speaking Thai
after eight sessions. What the course does do is strip away the mystery of the
language and provide you with skills and knowledge that will facilitate and
even accelerate any further study in the language. Given that, the course is
suited to:

• People who have just arrived in the country and want to start off on the right
  foot
• People who have lived in Thailand for a long time and have a working knowledge
  of Thai, though don’t feel confident when it comes to some of the finer details
• Anyone in between the above two categories

After having completed the programme, you will be well on your way to developing
an efficient self study regime that will have you realising things about
language that many teachers of language perhaps don’t realise themselves.

In saying this, I’d like to present what my vision would be if I were to take
this course:

**Q. “So why don’t you speak Thai after being here for so long?” **

A.* “Oh… I get by just fine speaking English here. I don’t need to learn Thai.
And besides… I went to learn once, but gave up after a few lessons. I’m just
not good at languages – and TONE DEAF!…. I can’t even sing in tune let alone
hear tones in a foreign language!” *

**Q. “Would you like to be able to speak Thai?” **

A.* “Of course I would, but unless you’re thinking of giving me a brain
transplant, I don’t see it happening any time soon. I made a conscious decision
a long time ago to not pursue the issue any further. I think I’ll stick to
English… I’m still struggling with that you know!”*

I’ve asked similar questions to numerous expats living in Thailand –
journalists, businessmen, government employees, teachers, housewives, students,
U.N. employees. – you name it! More often than not I get the above dialogue in
one shape or another. Other comments that I hear are – “Oh, I don’t know how
long I’ll be here for. I could be gone tomorrow. I don’t want to waste my time
on learning a language that I won’t get to use in the future. If I could learn
it by osmosis, sure!.. I wouldn’t say no – but to tell you the truth, I just
don’t have the time”.

I can’t guarantee that you’ll learn by osmosis. I can however help you to
prepare yourself to learn at a more ‘accelerated’ pace than what you might be
used to learning languages with. The results of this type of language
development will have you thinking and speaking in a more ‘native-like’ manner.
The bonus is that learning a language this way won’t take too much time out of
your schedule either. You will also have a great foundation for learning other
languages – especially those that are tonal, Sanskrit based or that have
Chinese roots. To start off, you’ll need to prepare yourself. The three areas
that I prepare myself in before learning a language are:

• Mental Preparation
• Physical Preparation
• The Preparation of Your Environment

Mental Preparation

After perusing through the introduction (a feat in itself) from a particular
book that has until recently been one of the standard ‘texts’ for learners of
Thai (I affectionately refer to this linguistic gem as the ‘Black Covered
Beast’ – though the most recent edition has strayed from tradition and gone for
a nice shade of mauve), I would feel like I was dead in the water before I even
started!

Extract

(The following is a word for word / letter for letter extract from the
Introduction on p.i of “The Fundamentals of the Thai Language – Sixth Edition”
by the editors of Marketing Media Associates Co., Ltd. )

“The Thai letters consist of 44 consonants and 22 vowels which are not the Roman
alphabet, the ABC. Then, it is quite difficult to the new comers to remember
them. That means, it will take you so long time that you will get bored or it
will make your learning “ unnatural” – much different from the way a child
acquise his/her mother’s language.

One letter may have several different sounds, and one sound may be represented by
several different letters. There are also many silent letters, which are
written but not pronounced. These are the reason that the learners may find it
a trouble to pronounce or read correctly. “

After reading the ‘pre-learning’ pep-talk, it’s as though it would be more
likely for me to come away unscathed from a free-fall from the top of Bay Yok
II Tower without a net, than have any remote chance of conquering the
Fundamentals of the Thai Language in this lifetime! These two paragraphs begin
to give us a hint of a number of issues regarding the Thai language and the way
it is perceived by many of its native speakers.

So often when I’m embarking on learning something new – especially a new
language, any hope of making real progress is all but quashed by being drowned
with statistics and so-called ‘facts’ about the new thing (language) that I’m
going to learn. Irrational comparisons are made between my mother tongue and
the new language –

• “…Thai has 44 consonants and 22 vowels!
• …The same word can have totally opposite meanings if you pronounce it with a
  different tone
• *…You have to say sentences around back to front… *
• *…There are some sounds in the language that I’ve never heard before! I don’t
  think I’ll ever be able to get my tongue around them… they just sound too
  foreign!…” *

In my mind, this is comparing apples with oranges.

The Floobenflahter Analogy

Suppose a being from the planet ‘Floobenflahter’ landed here on earth and found
himself standing in front of a cup of delicious Japanese Green Tea. In
Floobenflahter, water exists, but it’s a deep red colour.
Nevertheless, Floobenflahter water tastes just like earth water, and
provides Flooenflahterites with all the same benefits that water provides
us earthlings. There exists tea in Floobenflahter too, but it’s the same
red colour as Floobenflahter water, it tastes the same as Floobenflahter
water, and Flooenflahterites only drink it for medicinal purposes.

Our Floobenflahter friend concluded that Green Tea must be made with green water.

He was so taken by the taste of Green Tea on earth, that upon arriving back in
Floobenflahter, he started his lifetime quest in search of a natural spring of
green water. Only then could he make his Green Tea and live happily ever after.

It didn’t occur to him that:

• The green colour might not have come from the water
• If Floobenflahter tea was put into earth’s clear water, it might turn it red
• It was an extra ingredient that produced the taste of Green Tea that he is so
  fond of
• The colour of the water did not produce the taste
• The same water that was used to make tea could be used to make coffee,
  lemonade, hot-chocolate etc.

The truth is that cracking the Thai fundamentals shouldn’t take long at all. And
no, you don’t need to have a particular ‘flare’ for languages to do it. I have
witnessed the penny drop with many foreigners as I show them how to crack the
code to not just The Fundamentals of The Thai Language, but to thinking about
language itself! To experience the same feeling of success, we might just need
to make some adjustments to the way we think about the way we think.

Coming back to the Floobenflahter analogy, in my case, I have found that
‘meanings’ are to language, as ‘water’ is to tea, coffee, lemonade etc. You can
turn water into tea, or water into coffee, but not the other way around. Don’t
try to translate English grammar, sound rules, spelling etc. straight across to
Thai. It’s just like getting a cup of coffee and trying to turn it into tea.
With today’s technology it’s probably possible, but frankly, I’ll take the
water thanks! That way I can choose what drink I want to make. ‘Meanings’ in
this sense don’t just mean the meanings of words. Michael Halliday’s (the
father of Systemic Linguistics) models of ‘meaning’ best relate to my own
experiences in ‘acquiring’ and learning languages.

The Meaning of Meaning

Meanings lie in:

• The general culture that we’re communicating in
• The way we perceive the relationship with the person to whom we’re speaking- The fact that we choose different words in English to use with different people
  shows that our selection of words actually ‘changes’ the meaning of the
  sentence. If not, we would just speak to everyone using the same selection of
  words
• The method we’re communicating by- We might communicate differently by telephone as opposed to face to face, or
  through an email
• Topic that we’re talking about- A husband and wife might speak to each other differently about the family’s
  finances than they would about the movie that they watched on television
  the night before.

I was fortunate enough to have a brilliant and eccentric grandfather that for
took me under his wing and left me with the extraordinary legacy of being able
to understand just a fraction of what went through his mind. Like me, he was
extremely partial to anything linguistic – and would take any opportunity to
strike up a conversation on the topic. A simple conversation about the weather
would turn into a lesson on where the word weather came from, why ea is used to
represent the sound /e/, the importance of the concept of ‘sun’ in ancient
societies and consequently on their languages. He would describe the consonant,
vowel and semantic shifts that occurred from the original word that brought
about the various words that we use today. Heavy stuff for a six year old to
listen to when his mates are playing cricket outside, but strangely enough,
this kind of stuff fascinated me, and admittedly, I was hooked! One sentence
that I would hear over and over again was “Think loud! … Don’t let words limit
your thoughts”. I realise now that perhaps this is the reason why I have been
able to go on and learn many more languages. In many cases, I can consciously
think about ‘meanings’ (as I’ve defined them above) without the use of words. I
truly believe that this is a skill that can be developed by anyone willing to
give it an honest go. If each person can go away from one of my classes with
just a taste of being able to think in this manner (without using words), I
have achieved one of my main goals. Being liberated from words is a lot like
separating coffee from water. Once you’ve done it, the water is yours to do
whatever you want with it.

Preparing Physically

I could use the cliché analogy of an athlete preparing for the Olympics, but
I’ll spare you. I’ll relate this one to music instead. I come from a family of
musicians. All of us have played, listened to and composed music since
childhood. Although I can read music, I find it much easier to just listen to a
song and play it. The mixture of a good ear and no mentor to slap me across the
knuckles when I used the wrong fingers on the piano, led me to develop an
interesting technique that for many years would suffice for what I needed (and
wanted) to play. As the years went on, the jazz that I was playing was getting
more and more complicated. One day I realised that my hands just couldn’t cut
it. It was like strapping a 700cc motor to a push-bike! Because of that, I had
to gruellingly go back to the very rudiments of piano playing and re-learn all
my scales and fingering. In doing this, my hands started to ache in places that
I never knew that they could ache and I even started hearing new harmonic
relationships and colours between notes. New muscles were being developed, and
after not too long I was able to play runs that had always defeated me in the
past.

Learning a language is no different. It’s sometimes tempting to compare similar
traits in our mother tongue to a new language that we’re learning. This might
get us by – and people will probably understand what we’re trying to say. The
trouble rears its head when you want to start developing your fluency in the
language and you realise that the foundation that you’ve set yourself can’t cut
it. You speak with a heavy accent, the rhythm of the sentences don’t flow like
a native speaker and you still have puzzled faces staring blankly at you when
you try to pronounce a word that you thought you’ve been pronouncing correctly
for years!

Developing the muscles in your mouth from the very beginning is critical. You
need to be able to use your tongue, your lips, your throat, your glottis and
anything else that you can find in there, like an instrument. It will
facilitate fluency in the language from early on. For example, the phonetic
sound /a:/ – (the ‘a’ in ‘farm’) is produced from a different part of the mouth
in American English, Australian English, British English and so on. It’s also
pronounced differently in the many different sub-varieties of American English,
Australian English, British English. In some dialects it comes from the front
of the oral cavity. In others from the back, in others from the top-mid, in
some dialects the tongue is slightly raised at the front, in some at the back.
The same goes with other languages. I often see people’s tongues getting tied
in a knot when learning a new language because of this. They hear a sound
(perhaps like /a/) and assume it’s the same as the sound in their mother
tongue. When we human beings speak our native tongue, we subconsciously find
the most economic route to producing combinations of sounds that our mouths and
bodies will let us in that sound system.

Exercise 1

If you’re a native English speaker, try this test.

Say the sentence in a natural conversational manner –

“Why did you say he didn’t want it anymore?”

Now say the sentence over and over again, progressively getting faster and
faster until you can’t get any faster. Keep saying it until you don’t have to
think about the words coming out of your mouth and start to observe what your
mouth is doing. It’s really important to be honest when you’re doing this, and
not pretend that you speak according to the ‘ideals’ of how you think English
should be spoken. The point of this exercise is to show that the ‘ideals’ that
we might have about our own language might be very different to what actually
happens. As you’re observing yourself, ask yourself these questions:

• What’s your tongue doing? Where is it making contact with in your mouth? Where
  is it not making contact with in your mouth that you thought it should
  be?
• What is your throat doing?
• Does the pressure in your throat actually stop mid sentence?
• What’s your tongue doing for the first ‘d’ in the word ‘did’?
• What happens to the words ‘did’ and ‘you’?
• What about the words ‘say’ and ‘he’?
• What is going on with your tongue and nasal cavity in the word ‘didn’t’? Can
  you hear a faint clicking sound in your nose?
• How about ‘want it’? – Do you pronounce the plosive ‘t’s’…. really??? Do you
  pronounce the ‘i’ in ‘it’ as an /i/ sound like in /sit/, or does it really come
  out as more of an /ə/ sound? (don’t worry – you don’t have to be a New
  Zealander or a South African to do that!)

**Exercise 2 **

Try saying these words in groups making note of what your tongue, your lips and
voice box are doing during each portion of each utterance:

• Spy Pie Bye
• Skate Kate Gate
• Stuck Tuck Duck
• Apple Paul Please

From the past two exercises, have you noticed things that your mouth does that
you’ve never realised before? If you have, you’re well on your way to preparing
yourself physically (and mentally) for developing native-like fluency in a
language that’s not your mother tongue. We are now becoming conscious of sounds
that we are able to make – and do make everyday, that we never realised that we
could make. Many of these sounds are not that much unlike the ‘different’
sounds that we find in Thai. Try and be conscious of all the little things that
you otherwise do subconsciously when you use language. The next major obstacle
to get over after re-thinking the way we think about the way we think, is
re-thinking the way we think about the way we sound.

I would like to touch briefly on one other point that has to do with using the
sounds from our mother tongue on another language. In my Australian English, I
say the word ‘can’t’ as-

/ka:nt/. The ‘a’ is pronounced like ‘a’ in the word ‘car’. An American or
Canadian would pronounce the same word /kǽ:nt/ – something like the word
‘pant’. A subconscious rule gets made to make a lateral sound change– /a:/
becomes /ǽ:/. These two sounds are NOT the same sound. This rule sometimes
gets transferred across to the new language that one learning. In Thai, I have
heard many North Americans pronounce the word –
ฝรั่ง ‘farang’ (Which is used to mean a ‘western
foreigner’, pronounced /f۸۸ŋ/
) as /f’rǽ ŋ/ (rhymes with ‘meringue’). Unless the Thai person is
used to hearing ‘Farangs’ mispronounce the language, it might be difficult for
them to make out what is trying to be said. One skill that I will try and help
you develop, is that of being able to hear the subtle differences between
sounds, visualise where they are being produced from in the mouth and then be
able to reproduce them at call. You will find that after not long, you will see
the relationship between all the sounds in a particular language as a whole.
They comfortably fit together and can be uttered without seriously contorting
your face in the process.

Preparing Your Environment

This might seem a little strange. Isn’t living in Thailand a good enough
‘environment’ to learn Thai in? It is very easy as an expat to live in a
comfortable ‘non-Thai-bubble’ while staying here in Thailand. What’s that?? –
Lots of non-Thai friends or Thai friends who speak English, predominantly
western food, western books, western radio, western television and western
news. The English language Thai newspapers are next to the only real link we
would have to keeping our finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the
country at a local level.

When I was about fifteen years old, I went through a stage where I wanted to
eat, live and breathe the Scandinavian languages – in particular Danish. You
might be asking WHY??? .. I’ll leave that for another book. The Scandinavian
community in Australia is one of the smaller ethnic groups. I didn’t know where
to start. I wanted to be in a position where I could use my Danish in a more
‘native’ environment. I started with the Yellow and White Pages. I looked for
any Danish looking names and Scandinavian owned companies and took note of
where in the city they were. I would then call the companies, or just go there
and start to chat with them. From these encounters I began to meet people who
knew other people, be invited to various events, dinners, celebrations,
congregations – you name it! More often than not they were more than willing to
have a yarn in Danish with me. I began to frequent the Danish Consulate in
Sydney and take the old newspapers and magazines home (with permission of
course) to keep up to date with all the little things going on in Denmark and
with Danes around the world. I would take note of what programmes were on
television there, editorial write-ups on events, competitions being run. Within
a few weeks, my Danish network was growing and I was beginning to think more
like a Dane. I began to understand what made them laugh, idioms that got used
regularly (not just the ones that you get out of a ‘How to Speak Danish in 3
Months’ book), television shows that young people liked to quote lines from,
politicians that copped the brunt of peoples’ jokes and most importantly, how
the Danes see, hear and think about non-Danes.

Within no time, I was at a level with my Danish that I could carry my own in a
conversation about politics, religion or the price of beer in Kǿbehavn.
The more I spoke the more I listened. The more I listened, the more I heard –
and the more I could speak. This is the kind of vicious circle that I like
being in.

So, how would I recommend that you prepare your environment for learning Thai?

Even if you don’t understand the words, start buying and studying Thai
newspapers. You might have ‘seen’ them every day. Now really start looking at
what’s in them.

Watch Thai television! I know there’s a limit to the amount of commercial packed
dime-a-dozen celebrity studded game-shows that one can palate before the grey
matter starts to numb… but through sitting through these kinds of shows, you’ll
start to know the people that Thais talk about during lunch breaks, the new
sayings that come in and out of the language, the songs that people hum when
they’re in the shower…all the little things that are in their essence, ‘Thai’.
Not only will you know about these things, you will start doing them too.
Strike up a conversation with a Thai about ‘such and such’ that you saw last
night on Joh Jai (เจาะใจ- Late night talk
back programme on channel 5). Lyric books to all the songs you hear on the
radio are available on most street corners. Pick one up for around 20 Baht and
learn a few songs in Thai. If you’re really game, put your talent to the test
at one of the many cultural oases scattered around town that sprung up in the
90’s (often referred to by the layman as a ‘Karaoke Bar’). Once you start
getting into the Luk Tung music you’re hooked! There’s no going back.

Another good way to prepare your environment, is to buy a pocket-size
Thai-English dictionary. Take it with you wherever you go. Every new word that
you see or hear, look it up. Listen to words and sentences that that seem to
occur regularly in conversations. Take note of the context, who said it, the
tone of voice that was used and the reaction of the other person in the
conversation. By doing this you’ll start to feel the meanings, adding to your
semantic database as well as your vocabulary.

The Cracking Thai Fundamentals programme has been divided into a series of
‘keys’ to help you crack the code. Learn each key for what it is. Understanding
of each individual key will help put the whole linguistic picture together.
This will build your skills in, and understanding of not only the Thai
language, but the way we humans use language in general.