Peasaa K’mai (Khmer Language)

My Khmer language training course (part one) has almost come to an end, and it is amazing how much I have learned in such a short time! The teacher, Dara, is fantastic. It helps that Khmer grammar is mainly simple:
- There are no tenses: one just says "tomorrow", "yesterday", etc, to denote tense. Even conditional tenses are straightforward, unlike in English.
- Nouns don’t have genders (except with reference to people, of course!)
- There are no plurals
- One word can be used for many meanings, e.g. "knyom" means I, me, myself, my, mine, etc
- There is no need to get spelling right, as I just write down phonetically what I hear from the teacher for my own use.
However, pronunciation is very difficult. There are lots of sounds that are not used in English. Sentence construction is different as well, although quite logical, e.g. "Doctors how many work in hospital this?" There has been no attempt at learning written Khmer, as there are 30+ squiggles denoting vowel sounds and a further 30+ denoting consonants. Even numbers are written in squiggles! Definitely only for the advanced learner!
I have been learning Khmer in a class of seven people, four of whom are Filipino. Not only is English their second language, but they all have different accents, which makes for challenging group lessons.
I now have a grasp of several hundred words and am able to construct fairly complex sentences and questions. However, as soon as I get out of the classroom and start trying to talk to Cambodian people, my competence magically disappears!!! My language isn’t nearly good enough yet to use in a work environment, so the plan is that I will have a translator to work with me for the first five months. I shall be returning to Kampong Cham at the end of January for two weeks of further language training with Dara. In the meantime, once I’ve moved to Kompong Thom, I hope to arrange a couple of lessons a week with a local language teacher which I will share with my fellow volunteers, Rachel and Bram.