Krushing Koreans

Yesterday I spent three hours in a small, gray classroom repeating unhearable tones to a thin woman who never stopped smiling, even when the Japanese student got ten out of ten wrong. She is Kruu, or teacher. Kruu started class by having us practice vowels. Having not really thought about vowels for a very long time, it was kind of hilarious sitting in a classroom making the O face to practice long o sounds with five other adults. Also, Thai has some huge ridiculous number of vowels. Did anyone know there are like six ways to pronounce U? I did not.

Kruu gave us some listening sheets and she would pronounce different sounds, and we had to fill in the sounds she made on the sheet. I've always felt I was pretty good at languages, and I'm also quietly competitive, so I was irrationally angered when the Korean girls got perfect scores on the listening. I want to be the best! I want to get all the right answers! It made me feel better that the Spanish guy and the Irish guy did worse than me, but still. Schadenfraude only gets you so far in beating the Koreans.

Luckily, their Waterloo was yet to come: tones. In addition to multiple and ridiculous ways to pronounce the vowels, there are also tones in Thai. There are five tones: low (talk like you imagine a sexy telephone operator would talk), mid (normal), high (like when you get really mad and the ends of words start to go up in pitch), rising (gets confusing here: basically make the word dip, high on each end but low in the middle), and falling (reverse of rising, shockingly enough). While I admit I struggle to hear the tones when regular Thais talk, I can definitely hear Kruu's tones, probably because she talks as if her class is full of retarded bears.

I can't wait to see what today's class brings! Also, I vow to crush the Koreans.

While this looks very impressive, it's actually just me writing all the numbers to 100. I love the way some thai letters have hats.