It’s been a little over a month since I started learning Thai using the TV Method.  I finished my first drama on April 10th.  Since then, I’ve started two new dramas and have been watching them plus some cartoons.

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
4. Learning a language is like having a pet
5. L2 Holy Grail Books

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