When I first arrived in Cambodia I had 5 weeks of language lessons as part of in country training. Every day for 6 days a week we all cycled to class every afternoon and had 4 hours of khmer lessons. Every morning I would sit with my books at the Mekong Crossing Cafe having a long breakfast & try to make the words and grammar from the previous days lesson stick. The lessons were interrupted by a one week placement visit and it was horrifying to discover how much could be forgotten in 7 days. So having learnt the valuable lesson that speaking a new language takes a lot of hard work and study I promptly did no study for the first couple of months when settling into to life in Cambodia.
When my impotence at being unable to express myself reached a peak and my vocabulary was at an all time low, I arranged a lesson once a week with a grade 12 student who wanted to practice his english and earn some pocket money. I dutifully bought the grade one khmer book and set about trying to learn to read and write as well as speak and understand spoken khmer.
So once a week in my lunch time I meet up with Kosar and we attempt to go through the book. This however presented a few issues;
1) He has very poor english and is very keen to practice his english language skills and for me to help him with his homework.
2) He isn't a teacher & has no teaching ability - he is still a student himself.
3) Khmer has 33 consonants and 25 vowels (but the sound of these vowels changes with 'long or short sounds' making the grand total of approximately 50 vowels!), is not a roman alphabet and has sounds that my mouth have never articulated before.
4) Kosar expected me to read, write & speak all of these letters after the first one hour lesson.
5) I am not a very good student.
6) Despite my many previous academic successes he still manages to make me feel like an absolute idiot every week.
However he gets to practice english and earn some money I didn't really feel I could stop the lessons just because I wasn't learning any khmer.
J's Landlady is a physic teacher at the university and had taken it upon herself to start to teach G (J's husband) khmer every day at his home. She had also expressed an interest to teach other barangs khmer so G, acting as her agent, hooked her up with me and 5 other VSO volunteers. She managed to slot me into her busy schedule on weekend afternoons and for the last few weekends I have been getting into a routine of lessons with her. She is a teacher, she speaks some english and good french. However the lessons are still not straight forward khmer lessons and there are in fact three levels to them.
1) I learn khmer - the vowels all sound the same to me, there is no pattern to what sound is made when you attach them to a consonant, I can't remember how to write them one week to the next and I can't remember any words. The words I do remember I don't appear to be able to say in a way that a native speaker can understand and I still can't understand spoken khmer. Admittedly I am not speaking khmer all day every day and I am not studying every day so this may explain the slow progress.
2) Soyeth - or the landlady as she is referred to in VSO circles - really wants to improve her english. She is also widowed and her only son is studying in France so she has confessed she just enjoys the company and now she is busy teaching us all she feels less lonely. So most of the lesson involves us speaking in khmer-english and being distracted by talking about life, love and death. There has been plenty of laughter & tears, once she even leaned over and pinched my cheek. I have taught her to say "I need a wee". Its all good.
3) The landlady refers to me as 'the doctor' and a large part of the lesson involves a medical consultation. It started off with me offering her some paracetamol, graduated on to me seeing where she had 'traditional khmer medicine' - coining, her body was covered in deep purple bruises. Then last weekend she pulled out a blood pressure machine from her bag and we had a 30 minute consultation which included us both taking our blood pressures. I was laughing so much the machine kept 'error' messaging and she told me off for talking. This weekend I had to fill out a blood request form for her and then review the results and she brought all her medical notes which I had to review in a combination of french, english and vietnamese. When I had my last bout of gastro she even rubbed tiger balm on my back & stomach - there wasn't even a placebo effect.
What can I say other than it is a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Still I am not sure how the words I am learning from the grade one book are going to enrich my conversational khmer both at work and socially. It leads one to ponder what the creators of the book were thinking that Cambodian children of 5 years old need to learn, clearly that it is more useful to learn words never, ever used in common parlance.
Here's a challenge for you - make a commonly spoken sentence with the following words:-
Sowee Bai - to eat - used only when referring to the King eating
Dam Srie - the stalk of a rice plant
Kam plung kie - trigger of gun
Kai-ping-bo-row-my - full moon
Dow - to mark, to pinpoint, to suspect, to guess correctly
Kat-sigh-bow - to cut a symbolic ribbon
Dom-die - ball of earth
Harl - to fly (birds only)
Cham char - a type of tree
Kah - dry/dry up (but not any of the examples I offered in a sample sentence. As it turned out it is specifically used for when you are boiling water with something else in it - like a carrot!!!!)
Bay - to carry lovingly (this can not be used your smart phone!)
Bar bow - to rebel, to revolt, to riot (actually thanks to UK current affairs & BBC website I was able to make a sentence with this one)
Lay lar - desperately or uselessly
Sor char char - to interrogate
Lay loh - playful or frivolous (OK, that describes me perfectly especially when in a khmer lesson)
My two favourite sentences that appear in the book are:-
Grandchild Chom sucks the breast of sister Pye - Breast is best after all but the public health campaign never specified whose - oh actually it did - MOTHERS breast! I guess we haven't learnt the consonant 'Mo' yet so M'dai - mother wasn't an option in this sentence.
Do not pull the trigger of the gun! Cambodian history has seeped into the grade one khmer exercise book - there is nothing left to say.
When my impotence at being unable to express myself reached a peak and my vocabulary was at an all time low, I arranged a lesson once a week with a grade 12 student who wanted to practice his english and earn some pocket money. I dutifully bought the grade one khmer book and set about trying to learn to read and write as well as speak and understand spoken khmer.
So once a week in my lunch time I meet up with Kosar and we attempt to go through the book. This however presented a few issues;
1) He has very poor english and is very keen to practice his english language skills and for me to help him with his homework.
2) He isn't a teacher & has no teaching ability - he is still a student himself.
3) Khmer has 33 consonants and 25 vowels (but the sound of these vowels changes with 'long or short sounds' making the grand total of approximately 50 vowels!), is not a roman alphabet and has sounds that my mouth have never articulated before.
4) Kosar expected me to read, write & speak all of these letters after the first one hour lesson.
5) I am not a very good student.
6) Despite my many previous academic successes he still manages to make me feel like an absolute idiot every week.
However he gets to practice english and earn some money I didn't really feel I could stop the lessons just because I wasn't learning any khmer.
J's Landlady is a physic teacher at the university and had taken it upon herself to start to teach G (J's husband) khmer every day at his home. She had also expressed an interest to teach other barangs khmer so G, acting as her agent, hooked her up with me and 5 other VSO volunteers. She managed to slot me into her busy schedule on weekend afternoons and for the last few weekends I have been getting into a routine of lessons with her. She is a teacher, she speaks some english and good french. However the lessons are still not straight forward khmer lessons and there are in fact three levels to them.
1) I learn khmer - the vowels all sound the same to me, there is no pattern to what sound is made when you attach them to a consonant, I can't remember how to write them one week to the next and I can't remember any words. The words I do remember I don't appear to be able to say in a way that a native speaker can understand and I still can't understand spoken khmer. Admittedly I am not speaking khmer all day every day and I am not studying every day so this may explain the slow progress.
2) Soyeth - or the landlady as she is referred to in VSO circles - really wants to improve her english. She is also widowed and her only son is studying in France so she has confessed she just enjoys the company and now she is busy teaching us all she feels less lonely. So most of the lesson involves us speaking in khmer-english and being distracted by talking about life, love and death. There has been plenty of laughter & tears, once she even leaned over and pinched my cheek. I have taught her to say "I need a wee". Its all good.
3) The landlady refers to me as 'the doctor' and a large part of the lesson involves a medical consultation. It started off with me offering her some paracetamol, graduated on to me seeing where she had 'traditional khmer medicine' - coining, her body was covered in deep purple bruises. Then last weekend she pulled out a blood pressure machine from her bag and we had a 30 minute consultation which included us both taking our blood pressures. I was laughing so much the machine kept 'error' messaging and she told me off for talking. This weekend I had to fill out a blood request form for her and then review the results and she brought all her medical notes which I had to review in a combination of french, english and vietnamese. When I had my last bout of gastro she even rubbed tiger balm on my back & stomach - there wasn't even a placebo effect.
What can I say other than it is a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Still I am not sure how the words I am learning from the grade one book are going to enrich my conversational khmer both at work and socially. It leads one to ponder what the creators of the book were thinking that Cambodian children of 5 years old need to learn, clearly that it is more useful to learn words never, ever used in common parlance.
Here's a challenge for you - make a commonly spoken sentence with the following words:-
Sowee Bai - to eat - used only when referring to the King eating
Dam Srie - the stalk of a rice plant
Kam plung kie - trigger of gun
Kai-ping-bo-row-my - full moon
Dow - to mark, to pinpoint, to suspect, to guess correctly
Kat-sigh-bow - to cut a symbolic ribbon
Dom-die - ball of earth
Harl - to fly (birds only)
Cham char - a type of tree
Kah - dry/dry up (but not any of the examples I offered in a sample sentence. As it turned out it is specifically used for when you are boiling water with something else in it - like a carrot!!!!)
Bay - to carry lovingly (this can not be used your smart phone!)
Bar bow - to rebel, to revolt, to riot (actually thanks to UK current affairs & BBC website I was able to make a sentence with this one)
Lay lar - desperately or uselessly
Sor char char - to interrogate
Lay loh - playful or frivolous (OK, that describes me perfectly especially when in a khmer lesson)
My two favourite sentences that appear in the book are:-
Grandchild Chom sucks the breast of sister Pye - Breast is best after all but the public health campaign never specified whose - oh actually it did - MOTHERS breast! I guess we haven't learnt the consonant 'Mo' yet so M'dai - mother wasn't an option in this sentence.
Do not pull the trigger of the gun! Cambodian history has seeped into the grade one khmer exercise book - there is nothing left to say.
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