My new literacy campaign

To follow up on an earlier post, I have learned how to call for help in Khmer, and not a moment too soon. During the same lesson, I also asked Meng Seng Heng, my teacher, if he would begin teaching me to read the Khmer script.  This time, having sensed by now that I'm serious about learning the language and will stick with him through the rough times, Meng was only too happy to oblige.

The man has the patience of a saint.

After Meng's 15-minute introduction to the most basic aspects of the Khmer script, I had the perfect opportunity to practice my latest vocabulary acquisition:  Chooey pong!  Help!  What have I got myself into? Maybe I should have given more thought to migrating to New Zealand.  I could learn to speak Kiwi, and they use the Roman alphabet down there. But no, we're here now, and so I must buckle down and squint at the squiggles. O, so very many squiggles.

Who's this Meng fellow? you may ask. It's true, I started out studying an hour a day, five days a week at the Language Exchange Cambodia (LEC), a 20-minute walk from the house. There I had two teachers: one Monday-Wednesday and another on Thursday and Friday. This system could work because they follow a very regimented programme, so one picked up in the curriculum where the other left off.  Over coffee with my friend Malcolm, however, I mentioned that Ms. M-W consistently arrived 10-20 minutes late for each lesson and then proceeded to complain that she felt tired or unwell, and she never made up for the lost time at the end.  "You need Meng!" Malcolm opined.  Meng does charge a higher price ($10/hour), but he has a university degree in English and is a qualified language teacher. I see Meng only three hours a week, but I find that I'm learning more, faster and better than I did spending five hours at LEC. What's more, although the teaching was one-on-one in both cases, Meng can adjust the speed as he sees fit, because he doesn't have to coordinate with another teacher, so I'm reaping all the benefits of individual training now. Plus, I just like Meng enormously. He's got a wry sense of humour, and he's generous with his encouragement.

Spoken Khmer is only moderately difficult to learn. And by the way, it's pronounced K'my, not K'mare as its spelling would suggest. The phonetics can be a challenge, as there are many sounds foreign to English speakers, and the Cambodians just love their compound consonants.  Malcolm's personal favourite is the word for fat, overweight, heavy:  t'ngun.  He can't manage to say it in the requisite one syllable; I think that's why he goes to the gym so obsessively, hoping to avoid both obesity and using that dratted word. I struggle more with the triphthongs -- the combinations of three vowel sounds rolled into one. They tell me it's possible to say ah-oo-ee in one syllable, but my tongue must be t'ngun, because I can't manage it. The good news is that the syntax is far simpler than in most Indo-European languages -- there's no mucking about with tense or case endings, articles or gender.  

After my first lesson with Meng, I bought a three-ring binder and hole punch, and I dedicated a blank journal that my friends Mark and Sham had given me to my vocabulary notes.  After each class, I organise the notes I'd scribbled hastily in margins, and I plug new words and phrases into the stack of on-line flash cards I'm building. When I was studying at LEC, I arrived for class every day with a growing heap of loose photocopied pages tossed carelessly into my tote bag -- it reflected the somewhat cavalier attitude toward teaching that I sensed there. I flashed back to when I first studied Bahasa Malaysia at the YMCA. That's where I met Rose, a fellow linguist by training and herself a language teacher. Our teacher at the Y was a disaster. Despite speaking Malay as his native tongue, he hadn't a clue about teaching a language to adult learners.  There, too, in 2005, Rose and I arrived for class with loose pages, illegible scribbles in margins, and pens with gnawed ends and little ink. "This is ridiculous!" Rose said. "I'm a  teacher. I know how to be a good student, but I just can't seem to find the motivation to get it together for this class." I'd completely forgotten about that conversation until I looked at my newly organised materials, and I see the difference: I've turned back into the disciplined, motivated, even driven, student that I used to be in my school days. 

Some of the sloppiness reflected the teaching: Meng is highly organised, each lesson cogently laid out with clearly stated objectives, and exercises to practice listening, speaking, reading (Romanised) and writing. LEC was comparatively chaotic and random, and I remember Rose looking at the loose, photocopied nonsense we got at the YMCA and wailing, "Oh, what wouldn't I give for a syllabus!"  

A bigger part of the new regime, though, is my own desire to learn and to learn well. I'm still pondering this. I've studied a number of languages over the years with varying levels of enthusiasm. Turkish introduced me to the lovely concept of vowel harmony, and unlike the country itself, the language is a marvel of logic and consistency. I studied German all through my school years with something between diligence and fondness. I loved reading Mann and Hesse in the original, but ironically, I've never been to a German-speaking country. My experience of learning French merely cemented my already chronic Francophobia, but I had a blast picking up some Spanish before a trip to Argentina and speaking it there. After living in Malaysia for ten years, I should have been fluent in the official language, but I never moved past the functional level, if that. Now I am working intensely and joyfully to learn Khmer. 

Although I got off to a bad start learning Malay, I never came around and made a better effort as I'm doing here. For one thing, I was never able to find a better place or way to learn:  Rose and I both tried to find a more effective class or teacher, and we came up with nothing. Even the local universities at that time were offering Malay classes only for their full-time students, and other places, like YMCA, refused to reveal anything about their teachers' qualifications or experience, and we were loath to pay for another expensive course only to have it turn out as badly. Second, Malaysia is multi-cultural, and I lived in an area that was predominantly home to Indian- and Chinese-Malaysians. Many of them simply didn't speak Malay; others could but preferred English. As the relations between the ethnic groups grow ever more strained, the Malays holding the political power by dubious means, the inclination to embrace the Malay language dwindles daily. Many years ago, then Prime Minister Mahathir decreed that the language previously known as Bahasa Melayu (language of the Malays) would be known henceforth as Bahasa Malaysia (language of Malaysia). That was a nice bit of window-dressing, Mr. PM, but your racially divisive policies have ensured that the non-Malays will never embrace BM as their own national language, and that is a disincentive for non-Malaysians to learn the language, as well. I remember so many instances of Malays lighting up when I spoke the official language in a way that the Indians and Chinese did not. Clearly, they did not consider it their language. 

Khmer is Cambodia's only language, and far fewer Cambodians than Malaysians speak English. I could survive here without learning the language, but I would feel miserably confined to an expat ghetto. One blogger said she'd gone a bit beyond the part of Phnom Penh that caters to foreigners and was mortified that she couldn't ask a tuktuk driver to take her home. She promptly began her Khmer studies. So yes, need is the mother of determination as well as invention. That's one factor. When I try to speak Khmer, the response has been mostly warm and encouraging, the Cambodians happily correcting my pronunciation and waiting patiently while I cobble a sentence together. Is Khmer a pretty language?  Well, no, at least not to my ears, but it's not so ugly as to discourage me (which is why I never tried to learn Tamil). I question the degree to which a foreigner will ever be able to assimilate in Cambodia, but not learning the language will definitely relegate you to the periphery, and at the moment, that's plenty of incentive for me.  

And boy, do I need it!  (Those of you who aren't especially interested in linguistics may want to sneak out of this post now. I won't mind.)  

The Khmer script is an alphasyllabary, which Wikipedia helpfully defines as "a segmental writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as a unit:  each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary. This contrasts with a full alphabet, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad, in which vowel-marking is absent or optional..."  

Khmer has 33 consonants, which fall into two groups, each group having its own characteristics and behaviours. 

The vowels are where the fun starts. There are 24 vowels, plus 14 "extra vowels", presumably because 24 isn't enough to drive the foreigners out of the country in despair.  "Oh, don't worry about the extra vowels for now," Meng chuckles, implying that we'll be dealing with vowels for months, nay years to come.  Get this, though: a vowel may appear to the left or right of the syllable's consonant, or above or below it.  Better still, pieces of the vowel may appear in any of those locations.  

Here are a mere eight of the vowels and how they appear
in relation to the consonant, which is
represented by the square.

Best of all, the same vowel will have a different sound, depending upon whether it's paired with a consonant from Group 1 or Group 2.  "Oh, well, wait..." says Meng.  "Three of them don't change -- they sound the same all the time."  It takes him a moment to locate the three consistently voiced vowels on the chart which fills a whole page.

Despite having vowels which twine like ivy around the consonants, leaving a new reader to wonder which goes with what, Khmer does not see fit to put spaces between syllables or words. No, the text is also littered with a vast supply of diacritical and punctuation marks to make things... ahem... clearer.

I've never tried to learn a logographic writing system -- Chinese, say -- and I wonder how it would compare. The Khmer script is different enough from my own alphabet in both form and function to feel very strange indeed. In the end, though, I think and hope it will be worth the effort. Although it's been interesting to learn a new language solely by aural means, it's been limiting, as well. I hope that seeing words in the native script will improve my pronunciation. I can't always distinguish between two similar-sounding phonemes when I hear them, and ten people may write the same word ten different ways in the Roman script. 

So if you ever sit back and wonder what I'm up to, you can reasonably assume that I am, and will be for the foreseeable future, studying Khmer.