Thai Language

I was writing an email to my friend Mrs. Oliver last night and realized that there are many things that I have not talked about on the blog. Doesn’t my friend Jen have the coolest last name? It’s new to her, she’s just getting the hang of it I’m sure, probably still tripping over it a bit when she introduces herself. I love the name Oliver. Jen Oliver. It flows nicely off the tongue.

Well, I was supposed to get my stitches removed yesterday, but Ryan thought it might be a good idea to wait a bit longer as it’s still bleeding the slightest bit, which means it’s not closed up yet. Not surprising with all the walking around that we’ve been doing. Ryan gave me strict orders to take it easy and then yesterday morning was shaking me out of bed to go to breakfast and to show Chris around. Today I’ve done a lot more relaxing with Fatty so I’m hoping that tonight Ryan can take the stitches out. I trust him more to remove them than the mean evil nurse lady who stitched me up without properly novacaining me first.

We’re back on the island with Chris, obviously. Chris is hard at work to finish up his Divemaster so he can get to work and make money. And I’m back to working shop hours and starting to get a little edgy with regards to getting back in the water. Being stuck with only working shop hours is working well with getting Chris through his exams but does not pay enough (if anything).

So back to all this stuff that I’ve revealed to Jen but have kept hidden from all you blog readers…

The Thai language…it is painfully difficult for me to learn it. And I’ve finally realized why. I learned more Malay in three days in Kuala Lumpur from reading street signs and billboards than I’ve managed to learn Thai in 4 months. And I’ve figured that it’s because of the alphabet. Malay uses the Roman alphabet, which I can read and phonetically work words out. Thai has it’s own alphabet which I can’t read and when it’s spelled phonetically, it’s never spelled the same way twice (for example Koh vs. Ko for island, Phi Phi Ley is also spelled Phi Phi Leh or Pi Pi Leh or Pi Pi Ley depending on who you ask). It is difficult for me to remember a word if I ask someone “how do you say…” They’ll answer me and I’ll spend some time repeating it in my head, but then it goes away. It took me weeks to wrap my head around “hello” and “thank you.” I can now also say “fish,” “shark,” “cat,” “rice,” “sticky rice” and today I figured out that “tuk tuk” means “cheap cheap.” I’m working on how to say “no thank you.” I’m also fairly ok ordering my meal in Thai. But if you think about it, it’s quite abysmal.

I think Ryan's actually doing better than me at the Thai. And he's the one who says he's awful at languages, yadda, yadda, yadda.

We have Rosetta Stone in Thai, but honestly, I don’t need to be able to say “The boy on top of the airplane” in Thai. What I really need is to be able to communicate with my boat captain and the tank boys. Sometimes that’s frustrating. Like when I lost one of my fins - it would have been nice to communicate exactly that I expected us to find it when we went back out in the afternoon.

And the last part of this is that if I’m going to put a concerted effort into learning another language, Italian, German or Swedish would be much more valuable to my current profession than Thai.

More tomorrow as I’ve had to talk myself out of diving. I am being reasonably prudent. I have sold two Discover Diving customers and they want to go tomorrow. With Baht signs dancing in front of me, I was chomping at the bit to take them. But I am going to be cautious and let my foot have at least one more day out of the water. I would be really mad at myself if I went back in the water tomorrow and it got worse and then I was out of the water for another week. So I will pass on the big Baht and stay dry another day.

Sawadeeka.