Learning Khmer
on Paul O'Connor (Cambodia), 26/Nov/2011 07:02, 34 days ago
I've been meaning to write something about the Khmer language for a while now, and I was reminded of this this morning when Tak's mum temporarily forgot that we've been speaking Khmer together for a year and decided without warning to switch to French, and I realised I was finding it much harder to understand her. This might be due to the quality of her French, which she learnt at a time when almost every French-speaker in Cambodia had been killed, but still, it felt like a milestone in my progress with Khmer. It's not an easy language to learn, especially as it's the first language I've studied which doesn't use the Roman script, so I'm learning entirely through speaking and listening. The good thing is that people don't expect foreigners to speak any Khmer at all. In fact I get quite annoyed about this - if I go to a café with Tak they usually ask him what I want. But still, it means that people are very easily impressed and I get lots of nice compliments for the most basic phrases. And as the soon-to-be-realised Come Dine With Me footage will show, Ingran admitted on camera that I was better than him in our Khmerlessons back in March. I'm interested in languages and the logic with which they come up with their words. Some of my Khmer favourites are bear (honey tiger), giraffe (long cow), to grow up (get big and fat), jellyfish (sea cloud), and snot and ear wax (poo from the nose and ear respectively). I also like the fact that they use the same word for the inner tube of a bike and for the intestines of an animal. I've probably never eaten inner tube (though you can never be sure in Cambodia), but I'm willing to bet it doesn't taste that much worse.About a week ago I began learning the Khmer script, because it suddenly seemed ridiculous to be illiterate at the age of 26. It looks daunting at first and I'm not sure of my teacher's pedagogical commitment (an increasingly bored Tak is teaching me), but it's very satisfying because you make progress very quickly. When I get round to learning how to type, I'll write something in Khmer.I don't have any photos to go with any of this, so I'll just add some of the open day that was held this morning at Lauka school.