After taking a long break from Thai lessons due to exams and road trips, I am back at it again. I've done a pretty good job this week -- studying for an hour or so most days. To help study, I made flashcards of 60 Thai words I should be able to read, write and speak.
I'd guess my working Thai vocabulary is about 100 words now. This makes me wonder what my English vocab is (tens of thousands? how many words are in a dictionary anyway?) and I wonder if I will ever break 1000 in Thai.
It's interesting to think about what words are most common in a language. Which are the important ones? Which would you teach first? In English it's "A is for Apple, B is for Banana". In Thai its "gaw is for gai (chicken) and kaw is for kai (egg)."
Here are some of those 60 words I know (well, at least these are the English versions)
Amimals: dog, cat, rabbit, tiger, elephant, monkey, chicken, shrimp
Other Nouns: glass, dish, house, water, song, swing, rice, egg, head
Verbs: eat, think, fly, sing, sit, want, speak, give, forget, have, study
Adjectives: sour, spicy, hungry, good, drunk, small, red, green, blue
Did you Notice how many of these have to do with food? Also, I don't think tiger, elephant and monkey are some of the first English words you would learn, but they are very important Thai words.
So now I can say something like this:
gra-dtai nang ching-cha lagaw rawng plang chang
(The rabbit sits on the swing and sings the elephant song.)
Well done Stuart. It makes more sense than "the pen of my aunt is on the blackboard" in mangled French.
Personally, I like your sentence. It is certainly more interesting, entertaining, and creative than, "See Jane. See Jane run. Run Jane run."
That sentence about the rabbit and the elephant song is actually in my book. Apparently all Thai children learn "The Elephant Song". (Well, to be honest, the book writes it as two sentences. I just joined them with an "and".) But, you're right, it's a fun sentence. Learning is so much easier and more fun when what you are learning is a little bit silly and therefore more memorable.
Is there a Thai word for "silly"?
Keep up the good work ... and funny funny - but a good point, HR!!!!!!!