BORING STATS

In the 33 days I’ve been watching Thai television, I’ve racked up about 41 hours of Thai, which is about 1.3 hours a day.  I want to try to get this number closer to 2.0.  I’ve only missed 3 days, and I’ve made up for all three days by watching double the next day.  I like my consistency so far.

NEW UNDERSTANDING

I haven’t learned many new words since the last update, but I’m getting really good at recognizing names now.  I’m also doing well at identifying relationships: brothers, sisters, parents, children, friends, employees, etc and determining who is older than who.  I don’t know the details, but in Thai I’ve observed that people add a prefix to a person’s name if that person is older than them.

Some words that have jumped out at me are numbers.  I’ve seen people count to three.  I’ve seen them count to ten.  I’ve seen them talking about dates and phone numbers.  I don’t know all the Thai numbers yet, but if I hear a string of them I know them for what they are.  For example, check out this clip from a cool animated movie about some elephants.  At about the 6:00 mark, an elephant is playing hide-and-seek with some frogs.  Can you hear the frog counting to ten?

(P.S. check out part 8 of the same movie to see a badass war scene with elephant battles.)

Whenever I watch a drama, I have no problem at all following the general story.  Body language says so much and it’s easy to guess what’s going on just by watching the actors and the flow of the scenes.  What I don’t get is the details.

I don’t know what people are saying when they talk, but I am starting to recognize that some sounds are said over and over again.  Sometimes I find myself making a mental note of it: “oh, there’s that ‘eng’ word again”.  I suspect that after a few hundred more hours of hearing these words I will eventually sense some sort of pattern and more understanding will come.

RUNNING MY MOUTH

I’m not there yet though! For now, I just try to copy the sounds with my mouth.  I look at the Thai peoples’ faces when they talk and try to copy the shape of their mouths and produce the same sounds.  I got the idea to do this from watching my son learn how to speak.  He was copying the sounds I made long before he understood what I was saying to him.  When he was very little, we would sit in the tub together pa-pa-pa’ing and da-da-da’ing at each other.

I’m hoping that practicing Thai sounds in this way will help my accent in the future.  When I took Japanese classes in college way back when, we had to read and speak right away and I think it ruined my pronunciation for life.  We learned how to introduce ourselves.  The teacher modeled it a few times and then we had to produce it:  “Hajimemashite.  Watashi ha Tomasu desu.  Yoroshiku onegai shimasu.”  I didn’t sound anything like a Japanese person!  A few times hearing it is not enough!

Then we learned the syllabaries: “this character is ‘hi’”.  Too bad my reality of ‘hi’ was completely different from the ‘hi’ of every Japanese kid who ever lived.  I was learning the character for ‘hi’ but I couldn’t even say it right (though I thought I could!).  And once I learned all of the characters it was too late.  Now that I could read, the floodgates were opened.  Now I had access to a whole world of Japanese written language, a world that you take in through your eyes instead of your ears.  And it reinforced my bad speaking habits over and over again, thousands and thousands of times over.

Tens of thousands.  Hundreds even!

I didn’t learn until years later that Japanese “ki” and “hi” and “zu” don’t sound like English “ki”, “hi” and “zu”.  Boy was I surprised when I realized even later that NONE of the Japanese sounds have an English match.  Mouth shape is so important it’s not funny.  It seems so obvious now, but I never thought about it back then.  I learned how to speak Japanese primarily with my eyes, looking at black squiggles and turning them into incorrect American English mouth shapes.  That’s ridiculous.  Even audio input (ie, talking) passes through my (verbally-flawed) hiragana/kanji filter before the meaning is processed by my brain.  Unless I’m concentrating hard, my mind will ignore the subtle differences (which make a BIG DIFFERENCE in terms of pronunciation) between the real native Japanese sounds and my internalized off-Japanese sounds.

I never thought about it before now, but learning to read Japanese before I got the sounds down crippled my pronunciation.  Stay away from books people!  Until you can really talk!  Early literacy is foreign language polio.  (Disagree?  Write a blog post and link back to me ;) )

I’ve worked on fixing some of my Japanese sounds, but I’m so used to talking in a bad accent now that I doubt I can recover completely.

Back on track: I’m trying to get the Thai sounds down before I can understand Thai and definetly before I can read Thai.  So I use my ears and eyes (for looking at mouths, not squiggles) and copy Thai people on TV.  This will allow me to internalize the Thai sounds so that when I start speaking (around 1000 hours TV time? in theory) I will have the right tools in the toolbox.  Moreoever, when I do eventually learn to read I’ll be able to map the correct Thai sounds to the corresponding Thai squiggles (and boy are they squiggles! ;) ).

That’s my hypothesis for this little experiment anyway.

TV Method, Thai, Total Hours: 40.9

Related posts:

1. TV Method Thai Progress Report 1 (12 hours)
2. TV Method Thai
3. Project Mayhem – Learning a Foreign Language Through Movies

Greetings

Keith tipped me off that the first thing that would jump out at me would be greetings.  He was right.  When two or more people meet it’s natural for them to greet each other.  Dramas on TV tend to have several scenes where people run into one another, so there are a lot of greetings.  I already knew the basic Thai greeting, so it wasn’t exactly new, but I heard it a lot.  Good to know my ears could pick it up.  One new thing that I did pick up with regard to Thai greetings was that talking on the phone and talking in person are not the same thing.  Different greeting.

Names of People

I thought that I would pick up peoples’ names pretty quickly, but this turned out not to be the case. I didn’t figure out the two main characters’ names until episode 7.  And I was lucky.  I might not have figured it out if they hadn’t stuck the perfect scene in there.  This is what happenened:

The two characters (a guy and a girl) have been on the run trying to escape some bad guys with guns. This time they escape the bad guys by hopping on bicycles and heading into the forest. In the forest, they are surprised by a sharp decline in the terrain and they head downhill at a very high speed. They lose control of their bikes and tumble over a waterfall (what else?) into a small lake or pond.

The guy surfaces and can’t find the girl anywhere. He searches and searches, but no luck. He makes camp and at night goes to bed. Then he sees her in a dream and wakes up and begins calling her name over and over again. Meanwhile the girl, asleep in another part of the forest, has a similar dream and wakes up calling the guy’s name over and over. Either that or she heard him and starting calling back. Whatever. Anyway, they hear each other and continue calling each others’ names over and over until the guy finally finds the girl’s camp.

Until then, I had no idea what to call them. If that scene hadn’t been there, I probably still wouldn’t know. And I still don’t know that names of any of the other supporting characters.  Names are hard.

Names of Things

I have a 1.5 year old son, and he is just learning how to speak. Most of the words he can say are the names of objects: “star”, “moon”, “nose”, “feet”, “toe”, etc. It makes sense. It is easier to connect a sound to a physical object that you can see like the moon than it is to connect a sound to something abstract like … “abstract”. I thought it would be the same for me and I’d pick up on object names first.

The jury is still out on that one, but it seems to be coming true. The few times where I was able to jump up and say “Aha, that word probably means _______” were when a character (usually the female lead) would point to some object and say a word. This happened to me for banana, for snake/cobra, for telephone, for sunflower and for waterfall (I already knew the Thai word for waterfall though, so it doesn’t count).

I don’t remember the word for banana, as I only caught it once back in episode 1, but I was pretty sure at the time that she was naming the object, like “oh look, bananas!” I don’t remember sunflower or snake either. But telephone. I got telephone down.

The first time I heard it, the girl lead was walking down the street lost when she suddenly stopped and pointed and said the word. The camera pans over and there is a public telephone, which she uses to call someone (who I think may have been her mother). At this point, I had a feeling the word she said was the Thai word for telephone, but I wasn’t sure. It could have been “oh look” or “what’s that” or “finally!” for all I knew.

Then a few episodes later, the male lead does the universal phone symbol (hold your hand to the side of your head, thumb in your ear, pinky in front of your mouth) and says the same word. The evidence is building. Finally in Episode 8, the episode I watched today, there was a whole scene revolving around the two main characters borrowing a phone from some strange people and I heard that same word about eight times. I’m pretty sure I’m right and that word means “telephone”.

There is a little ambiguity though. In all cases, the phone was a big clunky one. I don’t know if this same word is used for cell phones or not. I’ll have to keep my ears open during cellphone scenes to make sure.

Conclusion

Two small victories in my first 12 hours.

1. I figured out the main characters’ names.
2. I figured out a word that means “phone”.

Beyond that I can generally follow the story of the drama, not with my ears, but with my eyes. There is a lot of action so it’s easy to understand. My ears are still getting used to the sounds of the Thai language. I feel like it’s not spoken as fast as Japanese is. I don’t understand what they are saying, but I feel like my ears catch everything, ie I don’t miss any syllables.

I’m at the halfway point in the drama now. I’ll write my next progress report when I finish the drama.

TV Method, Thai, Total Hours: 12

Related posts:

1. Foreign Language Polio: TV Method Thai Progress Report 2
2. TV Method Thai
3. How Many Days In Each Month: The Thai Way

1. They are talked to by everyone around them (nurses, parents, family, neighbors, etc).  They listen but there is no comprehension, no understanding.  Lots and lots of listening and watching.
2. Eventually, after they encounter the same words in the same contexts over and over again, they start to understand and connect the words to objects or ideas.  “Mama” refers to this person.  “Milk” is this tasty stuff that I like to drink.  “Bath” is this.  “Blanket” is this.  Over time, they are exposed to more and more ideas and words, and through repeated exposure, they start to understand more and more of what is said to them.
3. They babble, experimenting with different sounds in their mouths.
4. They start to say the words they know, mimicking the people around them.  (around 1 year old)
5. They start to say simple sentences. (around 2 years old)
6. They become pretty much fluent in their language.  They can express their feelings and understand most of what is told to them, at least for topics that are relevant to them at their age. (4-5 years)
7. They learn how to read.  (school)
8. They learn how to write. (school)
9. They learn about grammar. (school)

So the basic order is:

1. Listening
2. Speaking
3. Reading
4. Writing

The TV method tries to copy this order, but instead of finding yourself some new (say) Chinese parents, you watch Chinese TV shows instead for Baby Step 1 (Listening).

Keith has been experimenting with this method and documenting it as he goes.  At the time of this writing he has logged 437 hours of Chinese TV.  Reading his posts about the TV Method made me want to try it out, so that’s what I’ve done, starting a couple days ago.

If you’ve ever read the “About page” here on babelhut, you may have encountered this line under my profile section:

Someday, if lifetime permits, he [that's me] would like to learn Thai …

So I thought I’d use the TV method to learn me some Thai. My knowledge of Thai language is very close to zero. Here’s what I know, pre-TV Method:

1. I know how to say “hello”, “excuse me” and “thank you”.
2. I know how to say the number “5″.
3. I know how to say “I can’t speak Thai.”
4. I know how to say “This is for you.” (Taught to me for fun by a Thai coworker when I worked at the cafeteria back in the dorms. I delivered dirty dishes to him and said this when handing them over.)
5. I know a few other random words (waterfall, why, fish sauce, shrimp, stupid, very).

So I have about a 20-word head start over a Thai newborn (plus I can walk, eat solids and use a toilet).

The Thai drama I’ve started with is called “RAK NEE HUA JAI ROW JONG“. I have no idea what that means (please don’t tell me. For controlled-environment-experiment-purity reasons.) I’ve watched 5 episodes so far, and it was actually kinda funny because in episode 2 the girl lead found a waterfall and said “waterfall”, which out of the 20 Thai words I know is the one I least expected to encounter first (well, second. I heard “you” a lot before that scene). If you want to watch too, the whole season is up on Youtube here: RAK NEE HUA JAI ROW JONG

TV Method, Thai, Total Hours: 7.5

Related posts:

1. TV Method Thai Progress Report 1 (12 hours)
2. Foreign Language Polio: TV Method Thai Progress Report 2
3. L2 Holy Grail Books