Khmer Lessons

One of my hopes has been that I could study the language while I'm here--in a formal way beyond the inevitable practice that comes telling tuk-tuk drivers where I want to go, and so on.

Charley introduced me to the teacher he studied with in Wisconsin, who is a native of Phnom Penh. She's been tutoring me privately at my apartment. Altogether we will have 5 two hour lessons together. My final lesson is tomorrow, in the afternoon before I fly back to the States.

Sokhary is 5-10 years younger than I am and a bundle of energy. Fortunately, she's also very patient and very positive. Sokhary was studying French in high school when the Khmer Rouge took over. She hid her knowledge (necessary to survive, since anyone who spoke foreign languages, or wore glasses, or seemed educated, was executed) and survived by virtue of luck and a tough constitution. She was sick enough to be excused from work and put in a hospital at one point, where she was given an IV drip of coconut water....and she's still here. After the war, she couldn't resume study of French for political reasons, so she took up Russian, and spent a year studying in Moscow. She teaches in the States every summer, and has for about 10 years. One of her daughters is an English teacher in PP who trains ex-pats who are here helping with mine clearance how to speak to Khmer villagers.

Sokhary started by telling me that if I learned about 80 verbs and 1000 words and a few structures, I should be able to communicate pretty well. That seemed doable. I have strategies for acquiring vocabulary--many of which I invented when I was 17 and had to learn German by immersion as an exchange student in a small village of 5,000 people where I lived for a year--but stringing words together into sensible sentences requires gears to whir in my brain at a speed they don't seem to like.

I can see that I am making progress, certainly. And people here (in the markets, the tuk tuk drivers, the servers in restaurants) are consistent and sometimes florid in their praise. This says more about the generosity of the Cambodian people than it does about my proficiency. In one foray to the Russian market where I was helping another volunteer bargain for stuff, a vendor actually GAVE us things for free because I was speaking Khmer (haltingly). But the truth is, the second two native speakers start talking to each other, I'm lost. If I'm lucky, I recognize a word here or there.

I've had the kind of time I don't have at home, or when I'm here as a chaperone, to study how Khmer is written, too. Learning to read (much less write) would take me a whole lot more time, but I can at least recognize the most common consonants and occasionally I get a common word right. There are 33 consonants, each of which can be written in three ways--ornate script for signs on buildings, slanted script for books and newspapers, and subscript. There are also, depending on how you count, more than 20 vowels, which are written above, below, in front of, or behind the consonant (or consonant cluster, if there are two consonants together, one in subscript). Most of these vowels can be pronounced two different ways, depending on whether the consonant they modify is 'first series' or 'second series.' So the sheer number of marks that one needs to be able to distinguish among is well over 100, and many are quite similar. And then there's all the variation in handwritten Khmer.....

I am trying to use the energy that I ordinarily employ on sudoku and other such finite puzzles to work on the language. Decoding the visuals is, arguably, a finite puzzle--just of a magnitude that beggars even the most fiendish multiple overlapped sudoku.

But I'm not a language whiz, so I'm going easy on myself for how much Khmer I can take in at this point in my life. I think it helps that I learned a language by immersion once in the past, but of course my brain is well past the age when language acquisition comes easy. I bow to those who have the real gift. There's a volunteer I've met here in the past, college age (Trent, for those of you who know him), who is such a person: he now speaks, reads, and writes Khmer quite fluently. He can do simultaneous verbal translation. He also is fairly well along in his study of Sanskrit and Pali--the ancestors of written Khmer. And, last he was here, he began studying Chinese. It's a grand thing there are such people in the world.

Me, all I hope to do is move closer to functional Khmer for everyday purposes, and give people a good excuse to laugh at me. That's probably the best I can do toward bridging the linguistic divide and healing the human wounds brought about by so much suffering in this land, some of which, of course, relate directly to US policies in the past. So be it!