Victor Leigh

Yes, it has happened to me many times already. I have been learning Arabic on and off for years. Somehow, I never seem to get through to the end. I don't mean the end as in being an Arabic scholar. I would be happy if I can converse in Arabic. Or read an Arabic newspaper. In the beginning, I was put off by the way that Arabic goes from right to left. Then I got stuck with the way that, in Arabic, the form of the letter can change with its place in the word. Ah, excuses, excuses, excuses. I really must find some very strong motivation to push me through to the end of a basic course in Arabic.

Done. I have also invited some of my friends on Facebook. Many of them teach English as a second language in Thailand. It would be good to see more activity on the page. How about making some slightly controversial threads here and posting the link to the page? Nothing outrageous. Just slightly off-track would do. A little controversy can go a long way in making this forum go viral.

The only translation programme I use regularly is Google Translate. If this is an indication of the state of the art in machine translation, then I think human translators will still be in high demand for a long time to come. Most of the time, I use Google Translate to translate from English to Thai. It's not that I don't know Thai. I am simply hopeless at typing in Thai. So I use Google Translate to type in Thai for me. Since I am fluent in both English and Thai, I can immediately see where Google Translate has gone wrong. Now I have learned to put the English version in such a way that Google Translate will get it right in the Thai version. Can machine translations improve over time? Well, that's a possibility. What's needed is to build in an AI for learning on the job, so to speak. A language is made up of so many things which cannot be fully covered by rules set in stone. As my English teacher used to say, it all depends on the usage. The very same words can mean different things with different inflexions and different body language. That's something which machine translations will have a hard time coping with.

I really like the Thai word 'thiau' (เที่ยว). This word expresses a very Thai attitude to life. When a Thai says 'pai thiau', he means that he is just going somewhere with no particular business in mind, essentially going somewhere just for fun. If a Thai invites you to his house and say 'ma thiau thi ban', he means just to come for the fun of it, without any occasion attached to the visit.

I think there's something which goes like this: "Eat a lot of fish". It's supposed to mean that eating a lot of fish makes a person smarter. Not really sure how this works, since if fish were really that smart, we wouldn't be able to catch any, would we? Here's one which I am not really sure is a widely used idiom. When we say a woman is like a "frozen fish", we mean that she is frigid, unresponsive to sexual approaches. Is this used anywhere else?

I didn't face this problem when I was learning the languages which I now know. That's because I would be living in communities where the language is spoken natively. So I got lots of opportunities to listen to and to practice speaking the language. Now, considering that I intend to learn Arabic, this poses a small problem. People who speak Arabic natively are rare where I live now. I am really thinking about moving to an Arab-speaking country to learn Arabic.

I have seen some interesting situations when I watch kindergarten children being taught English in Thailand. Just about every child is taught the daily greetings which ended up with everyone being able only to say "Good morning" since school starts in the morning. Then the next thing they learn is "How are you?" to which they learn to reply "Fine, thank you. And you?" This is repeated umpteen times until just about every child can do it without thinking. Unfortunately many do not progress any further than that. It's not unusual to meet university students who can fluently say those few phrases and then, that's it. Tha's all they can speak in English.

I am sure all languages look beautiful to those who love the language. For me, the Arabic script is fascinating. It is so flexible and fluid. It can be written to form pictures, so beautifully.

From what little I know about the Thai language, I don't think there is the equivalent of 'the' in the Thai language. This always poses a problem when I teach the definite article to my Thai students. I have to stress and re-stress to them the need for using 'the' in the English language. In some ways, the Thai language is very straightforward. Supposing we say in English "Look at the cat". In Thai it would come out as 'du maeow' (ดู แมว) literally 'look cat'.

I hope the OP has already solved his problem about his partner learning English since it has been quite some while since this thread was started. However, for those who are facing a similar problem, here's something I have used when I teach English as a second language. Sing songs in English. Yes, sing songs. Never mind about the meaning of the lyrics. Just sing. It's fun and it gives an idea of how the language flows. That's important. It's not just a matter of being able to speak English. It's also necessary to speak English as it should be spoken. Otherwise, the learner speaker will always be held back by the feeling of inadequacy. Is it very difficult to speak English as it should be spoken? No, not at all. Just sing songs in English. That will get you started. So what songs to sing? I always recommend singing country songs. These songs are slow and the melody is easy to follow. Besides the words are clear. One of my favorites is "Blowing in the wind". I used to teach this to all my students. The melody is repetitive and the lyrics are very meaningful.

This thread is alive. I am so glad. I have been away for quite a while. Many things have changed. I no longer live in Thailand because of my health. No, no, it's not that Thailand is not healthy for me. It's just that I am not that healthy anymore and I live alone in Thailand which makes it rather risky. So, now I am back in Malaysia, living with my son, but my heart is in Thailand. Always. Here, in Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia, we are able to fix up satellite dishes to get TV transmissions from Thailand. Also, there are lots of Thai TV shows which are uploaded to Youtube, so if you want to listen to how native Thais talk, just search in Youtube. So what's my word for today? I think I will expand on the word 'jai' (ใจ). 'jai' is the shorter form of the Thai word for 'heart'. The full word is 'hua jai' (หัวใจ) which translates literally as 'head of the heart'. The word 'jai' can be used together with many other words to give different meanings. One combination has already been given earlier, which is 'khao jai' ie 'understand', formed from the words 'khao' ie 'enter' and 'jai' ie 'heart'. So 'khao jai' literally is 'enter heart'. In other words, to understand is to have something enter our heart. Thai is a rather literal language. Another word formed with the word 'jai' is 'jai dam'. 'Dam' means 'black', so 'jai dam' is 'black heart'. No prizes for guessing what that means. It's the same as what we mean when we say 'black hearted' in English. Interestingly, Chinese also uses the same combination to mean 'wicked'. The Chinese say 'hei xin' (黑心) which translates literally as 'black heart'. As you would have noticed here, in Thai, the adjective tends to follow the noun. In English, we would put the adjective before the noun. In Chinese, the adjective comes before the noun, too. I think this may have something to do with the structure of questions in the various languages. In English, we ask "What is it?" In Thai, the same question would be re-phrased as "Man ker arai?" (มันคืออะไร) which would translate literally as "It is what?" That should do for today. Over to you.

I think I am going to take forever and a day to learn the Arabic script. It's not that I cannot recognize the Arabic script. In fact, I can recognize many letters already. However I keep mixing them up. Like, when I first started, I would be totally confused by 'ba' and 'nun'. I keep asking myself 'now which one has the dot on top and which one has the dot on top'. Now I have solved that one by remembering, using Malay, that 'ba' had a dot 'bawah' ie below.

Here are some simple ones: bee - be sea - see tea - tee Actually these may seem alike or confusing only when they stand alone. When they are used in sentences, the chances of being doubtful about which meaning is alluded to, is near zero. For example, you are not likely to be confused by these sentences: I want to be like a bee, busy all day. When I look out to sea, I can see sails on the horizon. Before the golfers tee off, they usually have tea in the club house first.

I live in Thailand. Actually I have lived here for more than 20 years already. And I found the Thai language to be a very interesting language. So here's my contribution to the learning of the Thai language. The word for today is 'thiau'. If you pronounce it slowly, it sounds like 'thee yau'. 'thiau' has a meaning that is not directly translatable into English because it embodies a uniquely Thai concept. When you say 'ma thiau thi ban', it means 'come visit me at my house'. However, if you reverse translate, you will end up with 'ma yeam poom thi ban poom' because Thai has another word for 'visit' which is 'yeam'. 'thiau' is used when you mean to say you are going somewhere with no specific business in mind. Hope this helps you to understand the Thai language.

Here's an idea for getting your children to become interested in other languages. Introduce them to songs and movies in other languages. If the songs and movies are interesting, your children will want to learn the language in the songs and movies. I had one student who was an X-Japan fan and she learned, on her own, enough Japanese to understand the X-Japan songs.

The first thing I really learned about the Thai script was the way it is written. The first letter of the Thai alphabet is 'ko' which is usually named 'ko kai' ie 'ko' as used in the word 'kai'. It took me a whole exercise book of writing this first letter of the Thai alphabet before I found out that I had been writing it the wrong way round. The Thai letters are usually written from the bottom up. This may also explain why Thai students write the English letters from the bottom up as well.

I started learning a second language when I was just a few years old. I am a Chinese and we lived in a Malay community. So it was natural for me to start learning Malay. Then I went to an English kindergarten and I started learning a third language. Maybe this early exposure to different languages helped me to learn more languages as I grew older.

Just wondering. Is it possible to have a subforum where the exchanges actually take place on this forum? Like we can have, say, a Thai-English subforum where people who are good in English and want to learn Thai can have conversations with people who are good in Thai and want to learn English. If this happens, I can volunteer for the Thai-English sub-forum because I know both Thai and English. How about that?

Google Translate is useful but it is definitely not the panacea for all language problems. On Facebook, there is always that little button to translate. My friends include people who write in Thai and Arabic, so I have to use that little button quite often. And I often get a good laugh at the translations.

There is one instance where I found Google Translate working quite well. This is when I ask Google to translate a website. Probably the reason is that there are only that many ways of designing the navigation menu of a website. Plus there are icons to help a non-native understand. Add to that the Google translation, and you are good to go.

To learn a language is to know the peopl who use that language. A language is the sum total of the history and the culture of the people who use it. So to let our children learn at least one second language is a good way to broaden their view of the world. A good way to learn a language is to live where the natives speak that language. Myself, I hardly knew any Thai until I moved to Thailand. My son also learned Thai when he lived with me in Thailand.

Grammar, from what I know, is not exactly set in stone. Let me illustrate with a simple example. To be grammatically correct, we say 'Today I go' and 'Yesterday I went'. Why? Because this is how everybody uses the word 'go'. However, if everybody says 'Today I went' and 'Yesterday I go', then that would be the correct grammatical use of the word 'go'. As my English teacher used to say, "It depends on the usage".

I use Google translate to translate from English or Malay to Thai. Myself, I can actually read Thai but I am hopeless when it comes to typing in Thai. So I depend on Google to give me a hand. From my experience, I find that Google has a hard time understanding how Thai works. So if I want to translate from English to Thai, I have to write my English rather like the way Thais would use English. Simple stock phrases are fine but when it comes to anything more than a few words, I find it more fruitful to break up the sentences and translate them, then put the translated parts into a cohesive sentence in Thai.

Yes, I would and I did. Myself, I can converse fluently in 7 languages. However, none of my children have got so far yet. They need more than to be able to handle that many languages. After all it took me decades to get to where I am now.

Ah, that would be a monumental task which will require a team of translators who are fluent in both English and Chinese. Plus have a sense of poetry. You see, the Three-Word Mantras (I am translating freely here) are designed for easy memorization and contains elements of poetic rhyme and rhythm.