I still remember the first time I was ever able to read anything in Thai.  It was their word for "eat", which happens to be "gin" (hard g sound as in gun joined with in).  It was on my computer screen late at night and I was just finishing up with my free lesson courtesy of a website called "Learn Thai From a White Guy".  I already knew how to say the word "gin" because when you're hungry in a far off place, eat is an important word to know along with other important words like "please" and "thank you".    It's funny how any success no matter how small can often spur you on, increase your confidence level, make you feel you can do almost anything.  Around this same time, I began noticing other simple words on signs such as the names of villages on the local bus (Minburi), or if a store was "open" or "closed", and the nearest I can describe it is that I felt like I was gaining some sort of a superpower, maybe like Spiderman when he was bitten by the spider.  I'm not sure if that analogy works because I only saw the movie once and that was on a Korean Air jet somewhere over the Pacific and this was back before everyone had their own little TVs.    I had to watch it on a 1 meter wide screen on the opposite side of the aisle of the plane.   But I think that's what happened in the movie.  A spider bit him.

For too long Thai letters had carried no more information for me than scribbling by a preschooler does when their teacher is out of the room and they write on their wall with crayons, and I was always impressed on some level whenever some passing stranger was able to stop and make sense of them for me.    I've since learned that the letters in certain alphabets like Sanskrit, Khmer, and Thai look so curly because the material they were originally written on was very loose.   Leaves of bamboo, bark from trees, stuff like that, media that moved easily when you try to write on them.  In the West on the other hand, the Greek alphabet (the ancestor of the one we all use in English) was written on sturdier stuff like wax tablets and parchments spread over rocks.   Actually, I oversimplified things already because the Greeks got their first several letters from the Phoneciaens.   In hindsight it's not surprising letters like ?? and ?? were first invented by a people whose job it was to sail off to far away places and make deals with other people for stuff like tin and ??.     The Phonecians had to keep track of these things or their lives would have come to resemble what my bedroom looked like when I was a teenager with stuff all over the place, which wouldn't have been a great way to run a trading empire around the Mediterranean.

Before I learned how to recognize the letters that spell "eat" in Thai I did know one other letter, though, a vowel Thais call Sera Ah becasue it makes the ahhh sound.   The Sera part just tells you that the word following Sera is going to be the vowel sound.  For example, Sera eee tells you it's the long-e sound, Sera ooo is the letter that makes the "ooo" sound, as in "soup", etc.    The only reason I knew the letter Sera Ah was that it happens to be written on all the money.   The Thai currency is the "baht", and Sera Ah is in the middle of the word baht, plus it looks like an upside down J, so I was able to imagine the vowel was some sort of device a doctor might shove down my throat to have a quick look while I'm having to say "ahhh".   The reason I'm telling you this is because this same kind of "imagining", often involving other strangely unwelcome situations, is how I finally learned all the other letters in the Thai alphabet and it's a method the Learn Thai From a White Guy place uses as well.

One of the best ways I found around this time to expand my understanding of written Thai was the signs on the piers for the canal and river boats in Bangkok.   You see, under each Thai word for all the stops was the same word but in English.    Since I knew how English is supposed to be pronounced (usually) it was a short hop, skip, and a jump to understand how the Thai letters were supposed to be pronounced.    For example, Hua Chang means "head of elephant" in Thai and one of the stops the canal boat made was at Saphan Hua Chang, or elephant head bridge.   I knew for sure because Sapan Hua Chang was written in English just below the Thai words . . . ??

Please bear with me, because I'm now getting to the part of the Thai language that has come to both fascinate and enchant me.    After gaining enough confidence in basic pronunciations, I was able to start asking more intelligent questions, often of my students.  The nice thing about teaching English is that the person you're teaching knows a whole nother language and they are often eager to reciprocate when you ask them to teach you.   Some people that teach don't like to look too vulnerable and have to admit when they don't know everything, but I actually kind of enjoy putting myself in that position sometimes because it lets the student know it's okay to make mistakes and they don't have to be perfect because their teacher sure isn't.  Plus, it gives the student a feeling of giving back, so that's another reason why I often ask my students to help me.   They don't usually mind and in fact can make them feel good in return.  Thais smile a lot - not always because they're happy though - which is going to be a separate post someday soon.   But these days I can tell when a Thai is actually happy and smiling and they're almost always happy when I ask them to teach me about their language.