หมวกค้ดสรร The Sorting Hat

The Sorting Hat song contained a lot of difficult material. This is kind of piecemeal (ขี่เกียจเลย จนจะเขียนทั้งหมดไม่ได้).

• พำนัก fancy version of พัก

ชอบท้าทายเป็นวีรบุรุษยิ่ง นี่คือสัญลักษณ์กริฟฟินดอร์ Not quite sure how to parse the first half.

• วีรบุรุษ hero
• ท้าทาย challenge, defy
• สัญลักษณ์ sign, symbol (I can spell this! Obviously related to ลักษณะ (characteristics).)

(Regarding Hufflepuff:) บ้านนี้ไว้คนทนไม่ย่อท้อ

• ย่อท้อ lose heart, be discouraged

ยุติธรรมภักดีไม่รีรอ

Holy unfamiliar vocab! To the Bat-dictionary:

• ยุติธรรม fair, justice
• ภักดี loyal, faithful
• รีรอ pause from uncertainty of mind

ไม่สอพลอไม่เกี่ยงงานวานก็ทำ

• สอพลอ fawn on, curry favor
• เกี่ยง argue over
• วาน ask someone to do something for you (trying to find more usage of, but the term เมื่อวาน is much more common)

(On Slitherin) ซึ่งเป็นถิ่นพบมิตรแท้ชีวิตนี่

• มิตรแท้ good friend (strange pronunciation, apparently มิด-ตฺระ-แท้)

Here’s some other words I jotted down, sorry without any context.

• หรูหรา sumptuous, luxurious
• คำแวววาว (แวววาว glittering, glaring) a good word for ว fans (you know who you are!)
• บรรดา all (I was confusing this for something else)
• กำมาหยี่ (I can’t figure this one out.)
• แป้น stool (got from context)
• ชอบกล funny, strange, peculiar. Oddly, ไม่ชอบกล has a very similar definition.
• ระเบียงทางเดิน veranda?

A Math Lesson

I was checking out the Changkui.com podcast, and there was this video, and I watched it, and you need to watch it as well.

State of the Thai

Here is a general all-around update on my Thai progress.

Reading:

Still my most advanced skill, and still by far (although the gap is shortening.) I recently had a “breakthrough” I was long anticipating. I’m currently reading at what I think is a very respectable speed. If I understand the text, it’s not far off from my English reading speed. I understand most basic sentences easily and while there are tons of unknown or new words, they don’t stop me in my tracks anymore.  If I’m unsure of the meaning, I can parse what could fit, quickly. Even if it’s a new word, I can often figure it out from context. Then we have words I can’t intuit. These I usually just ignore. For now. I know I’ll see the word again, and again, and if I look it up later, I’ll have memory of it being used in many contexts already.

Hearing/Speaking:

I was getting REALLY frustrated with my inability to parse spoken Thai. So I put a bunch of Thai on my iPod and listened to it as much as I could. This helped immediately and immensely. The problem was that I wasn’t pronouncing Thai anything at all correctly. My Thai was progressing, but my pronunciation was very idiosyncratic. I have been working slowly, almost phoneme-by-phoneme, to exact my pronunciation. This has in turn helped my listening, I assume because the Thai I’m reading internally is moving closer to real Thai. I had epiphanies on the tones and vowel lengths as well.

The progress of my listening comprehension has been one of the most tangible improvements I’ve noticed. I moved through a number of stages. First, Thai sounded like every other unknown language does: gobbledygook. As I began learning, words started “popping out” from the noise. The ratio of words to noise increased slowly, until I had the breakthrough. Now I can “hear” the words very clearly. (Even the tones.) Normal speech is still a little too fast to keep up with, but well-enunciated reading is tantalizingly comprehensible.

The funny thing is… I don’t really speak Thai. I never really have. This is half the reason my internal pronunciation was so off. (The other half is that I didn’t listen nearly enough.) Only recently have I begun speaking much. I really can’t rate my pronunciation, but it’s closing in. I believe I’m doing all the vowels correctly- including the weird ones, like เอย and เออ. Things that still give me trouble:

ต vs ด: I can usually discern these sounds, but articulating ต is pretty iffy. I have a similar problem with ป and บ, but I can discern them pretty easily.
อ็ vs โอะ: I have trouble on these specifically. The long ออ and โอ are obvious to me.
Pali/Sanskrit words: The tricky vowels trip up my pronunciation, and tones just make it worse.
Pronunciation variability: I can’t do the trilled r, and for some reason I prefer that to the [l] pronunciation (even though [l] seems to me to be more common. I also never drop the consonant clusters. These are two pronunciation choices I’ve made, and it influences how I listen. Eventually I’ll have to incorporate that variability…
Tones: I’m getting these. I kind of mentally “tag” each word with a tone, but I’m trying to replace that with a more natural understanding of the tones. They’re starting to make sense. The specific contour of the falling tone has become pretty natural. I’ve found my conception of the tones very closely matches this diagram:

The phrase that really helped me “get” tones was ถึงแม้ว่า. It was very difficult for me to uncouple intonation from it’s use in English. I’m used to tones being used supersegmentally, to give contour to sentences. It was hard to abandon this- I was giving “mid” tone words an English-style contour. I didn’t notice that *lack* of contour, the flat vowel, is vitally important. (Digression: when I learned this, the use of falling tone in English transliteration, like my name, แอ็บบี้, suddenly made sense. The falling tone mimicks the contour of English!) Anyway, it was repeatedly hearing ถึงแม้ว่า, in different contexts, but always with the same exact contour, that made the tones finally sink in.

Writing:

Ain’t done much writing. I will probably try some in a little while. I’ve noticed Thai starting to bounce around in my brain a lot more. I’m often testing words on my tongue. Today I played that “try to name everything you can see from where you’re standing” game and was surprised how many things I could name. And things I couldn’t, well, that’s a gap in my knowledge I’ll be watching for.

I have been writing short messages on Facebook and Twitter- mostly passive-aggressive notes about my roommates. But besides these, I really haven’t been trying to string words together on my own. I’m not making it my top priority right now.

***

So, I have a long long ways to go, but I think my Thai is in good shape. I’m going to focus on reading and listening for now… I’ll be in very good shape when I actually get around to speaking the language.

Father Ant, Mother Ant

Harry Potter has been going extremely well. I’m almost done the fourth chapter. Haven’t been looking words up, just jotting down annoying words for later investigation. Seeing a word repeatedly and not knowing how to pronounce it is *very* annoying. Semantic ambiguity, I’ve found, is a lot easier to tolerate.

This is covering chapters 2-4, sorta.

พ่อมด

It took me a bit to realize this meant “wizard”. The female equivalent is แม่มด. I assume that the มด here doesn’t have anything to do with the word for ant.

เวทมนตร์

magic, pronounced เวท มน

เป็นๆ

to be live

p. 69: เขาดึงนกฮูกออกมาจากกระเป๋าเสื้อโค้ตอีกข้างหนึ่ง — นกฮูกเป็นๆ ที่หน้าตายับยู่ยี่เล็กน้อย

He (Hagrid) pulled an owl from his coat pocket- a live owl that looked a little ruffled.

(ยับยู่ยี่= crinkled; antonym of เรียบ)

สาบาน to take an oath, swear (used here for dialog, like บอก, ถาม, ตอบ, เสนอ, etc)

หล่อน “her”, IIRC used only in novels. Mistook it for หล่อ and was very confused.

I’m getting ค่อย and คอย conflustered.

กระชาก- to drag off, yank

หน- I figured out that this was synonymous with คราว pretty quickly. The great thing about reading a long text at a normal pace is that I’m noticing a lot more patterns. Most words come up repeatedly and I’m learning immense, immense amounts purely from context. Boo-yah.

มังกร dragon

ต้ม cheat, swindle

เคาะ to knock, maybe like on a door. This is an example of a word I learned pretty quickly. I better start learning words quickly, because there are a LOT of words out there.

วันรุ่งขึ้น the next morning (any connection to พรุ่ง?)

ซอมซ่อ shabby

ร้านกาจ harsh, severe, wicked

ชั่งน้ำหนัก weigh (pretty easy to figure out from context)

ลุกแดง to blush?

ลออ- “beautiful”. Interesting contrast to หล่อ
Weird pronunciation: ละ-ออ

หินงอก stalagmite
หินย้อย stalactite
(I can’t keep the English pair straight; these are more transparent.)

ข้ออ้าง justification, reference (I intuited it as “excuse”, which is close enough.)

ซีด pale

“ตั้งนานนมเนมา”
I assume this means “a really REALLY long time”.

ลาก “pull”, I’ll have to watch for how it relates to ดึง.

สาป “to curse”, คำสาป “a curse”

เน่า to decay, be rotten

จาม “sneeze”

Harry and Hagrid are currently touring Diagon Alley, or ตรอกไดแอกอน, which ruins the pun. The wizard shops offer a number of challenges (given their esoteric contents) but all in all I’m having no problem. I think by the time I finish these two books I’ll be in very good shape.

แฮร์รี่ พอตเตอร์ บทที่หนึ่ง

I’m currently reading Harry Potter and the Philosoph(Sorcer)er’s Stone, AKA แฮร์รี่ พอตเตอร์ กับศิลาอาถรรพ์. Translated by สุมาลี. I have read this in English, but a long time ago, so I know the story in broad strokes. I’ve read the first chapter, and it’s going very well. I’ve not been looking up words at all; I’m just reading the Thai. Lots is still fuzzy, but I definitely have the essentials down pretty well.

Here is my “Vex list” for the first chapter- words that annoyed me enough that I jotted them down to look up later, which has arrived.

เป์นตุเป็นตะ

To make sense, be coherent.

ศาสตราจารย์

Pronounced: สาด สะ ตรา จาน

As in ศาสตราจารย์ มักกอนนากาล, Professor McGonnagol.. I intuited the meaning but obviously have to look up the pronunciation.

พยักหน้า

to nod in agreement

อนาคต

the future (elegant) อนา คต

ราตรี

night (elegant)

The phrase ราตรีสวัสดิ์ครับ caught my eye. Apparently it’s an olde timey way of saying “goodbye”. The translator uses ราตรี again in the next paragraph, to describe Hagrid’s exit:

แล้วมันก็พุ่งทะยานไปในอากาศส่งเสียงดังคำรามก้องและบินลับหายไปในราตรี

blah blah blah … and disappeared into the night.

รอด- to escape danger

เตาผิง- fireplace

Come Together

I took a two-month break from Thai.  I basically abandoned my studies, abruptly, and I wasn’t sure when or if I’d bother starting again.

Then, the 4th book I ordered from Dokyausa.com finally arrived. I decided to give it a read… and it went very well. And I was surprised with how fast my reading was. It’s actually good enough that I can read (for comprehension) at the speed of a narrator’s voice. This meant I could read along with the Thai Basic Reader. And this had an immediate, profound effect on my internal pronunciation. I suddenly “got” the vowel length distinction, and the tones made a lot more sense. The problem was basically with my internal tone pronunciation. I didn’t get the flatness of the mid-tone or the way the falling tone starts higher than the high tone. Now, suddenly, everything clicks. This has an immediate effect on my listening comprehension. I can suddenly understand the TBR lesson audio, just as well as when I’m reading it.

Suddenly (this all happened in like, a week?) Thai makes so much more sense. I still have a lot of work to do, but this breakthrough has been really encouraging.

Now, to read, read, read, read, read. I’ve ordered the first two Harry Potter books in Thai. I’d rather read some original Thai, but Harry Potter is both easy to find, and thick.

Group Sourcing เป็นต้น

Interesting New York Times article about group-sourcing translations.

In 2007, Facebook asked volunteers to offer translations of the standard explanatory language throughout the site into more than 20 languages, with translators voting among themselves for preferred verbiage. Some faulted the company, saying it was shortchanging translators.

But Nataly Kelly, a former Spanish translator who is an analyst at Common Sense Advisory, a research firm that studies how companies translate, said that Facebook’s critics had missed the big picture.

“It would have been far cheaper for Facebook to pay translators 10 cents a word to translate material than to build a community and pay engineers to set up all this infrastructure,” said Ms. Kelly, who volunteered on the Facebook project herself, casting a vote on such head-scratchers as what to call the Facebook profile “wall,” since in Spanish there are different words for interior and exterior walls.

Better than machine translation… but it would make for dull prose, I imagine.

I’ve been twittering in Thai. Would have mentioned it sooner but I wanted to make sure it was something I’d stick with.

My study right now consists mostly of reading. Book after book and then I’ll need more books. It’s very rewarding and I’m absorbing a lot amazingly quickly, but I could very easily ramp it up. And my listening skills are still lagging. I need to set some goals, maybe even revive this blog. But probably not don’t worry.

I had an encounter today that made me realize my social anxiety is putting a huge obstacle in the way of my language study. I am pretty bad at communication, and that’s kind of the purpose of the whole language thing!

I would like to point out one bit of the conversation:

Me: Where in Thailand are you from?
Guy: I’ve been here about four months.
Me: No, where in Thailand?
Guy: (similar reply)
Me: uh… ที่ไหนในเมืองไทย
Guy: ah, กรุงเทบฯ

This is the first time I’ve ever productively communicated in spoken Thai.

I need to get over my shyness and make a habit of this.

เสน่ห์ภาษาไทย

Currently reading: เสน่ห์ภาษาไทย, which is a collection of newspaper columns by นิตยา กาญจนะวรรณ. I’ve read almost half so far, and it’s been very rewarding and interesting. It’s easier to read than ฝนตกตลอดเวลา so I’m having success with reading without a dictionary by my side. My comprehension is spotty (and/or foggy) but I’m getting so much from it I really can legally say I’m reading Thai. The language police will not arrest me for overstating my language skills.

…reading, at least. My listening/writing/speaking are still abysmal. But the sheer volume of input I am inputing is suddenly magnitudes larger. With so much comprehensible, I assume things will start sinking in. I’ve been doing a lot more listening and my comprehension is improving, slowly. I’ve been working specifically on my internal pronunciation, especially with Sanskrit/Pali words. I’ve learned that I really do need to hear the words to get them. You can extrapolate the pronunciation information from the orthography, but as accurate as Thai’s is, it’s not a substitution for hearing the word aloud. I think I’m closing to “cracking” the pronunciation.

Anyway, เสน่ห์ภาษาไทย is interesting and informative, even if I’m not getting absolutely everything. The column is about Thai, apparently aimed at the everyday newspaper audience. I’d compare it to William Safire’s columns about English, but more interesting. My favorite chapter is the one on the language of Karaoke (คาราโอเกะ). คารา means ว่างเปล่า, and apparently the oke (โอเกะ) derives from the English “orchestra”. The author then goes on to discuss transliteration schemes (and all the sorts seen on Karaoke screens.) Eventually we learn how ภูเก็ต is transliterated as Phuket, and that when “ออกสำเนียงฝ่รังเต็มที่” (pronounced farung-style) it sounds like “Fuck it”. The author apologizes: “ชออภัย ไม่ได้หยาบคาย แต่เป็นตัวอย่างที่น่าสนใจจ้ะ”

I’m already halfway through, and when I’m finished I’ll jump back into ฝนตกตลอดเวลา. That is more difficult and slower going, but I’m still ecstatic to be able to read contemporary Thai fiction, no matter the pace. Then I have one more book coming from DokyaUSA. But I should have my laptop screen fixed with in the next few days. For months I’ve been using a very crappy CRT monitor which has honestly limited the amount of Thai I’ve been able to read.

ฝนตกตลอดเวลา

I am currently reading the novel ฝนตกตลอดเวลา by ปราบดา หยุ่น. And I think I can use the word “reading” honestly. I read the first chapter through, making an effort to not look anything up. It went well. I didn’t grasp all of it, but enough that it actually held my interest. I finally know enough that I can “fill in” a lot of words from their context.

My Thai has continued to improve. I’ve been listening a lot more and trying to perfect my internal pronunciation. One of my current emphases is on the long/short vowel distinction. When you look for it, it’s pretty obvious. Tones are still an issue, but I’m working on it.

As for SRS- I’ve revised everything to be sentence-based, which was easy to do. It’s been going well, except that week where I stopped and 400 cards piled up.

So this blog is kind of in remission… sorry. I see this blog as a long-term thing. I’ll be studying Thai for a long time, and when I have the will/time/resources to write in here, I will.

ยังไม่ตายแล้ว

Obviously studying Thai takes priority over writing about studying Thai. I have been struggling to keep up a daily routine, and have not had the motivation to update much here. I do have an unfinished post about the word ที which should be first in a series.

But just in time, my first Thai book finally arrived! A comic book about Galileo. It’s gotten me way too excited and it will re-invigorate my study. My lack of fresh printed material was really cramping my style. This book looks fun; it’s a full-color children’s comic- translated from Korean- and has some pretty strange art. Best of all, it’s all about teaching kids science, and besides the dialogue it has plenty of text about Newtonian physics and Galileo to sink my teeth into.

As an added bonus, the comic was wrapped in an entire Thai newspaper, ข่าวสดUSA. So I have no shortage of material, for now…