Chuckler’s Musings

Well dudes, I hereby calculate that this is day 31 of my time in Bangers. Today was a good day.

I decided to enrol in a Thai language course. It’s laughably cheap, and for my AU$200 (probably less now considering the sliding US dollar) I get 60 hours of teaching, spread over 20 days at 3 hours/day. There are 3 others in my class - a guy from Iceland, an American guy, and a middle-aged Korean lady.

I was this close || to giving it a miss today (and therefore this month) actually. I mean, with Bek and Brett visiting, and Godfrey visiting … and work … who will have time for these three hours per afternoon?

But I went. And I loved it. So far, I’m the most advanced student which is pretty cool too. Our teacher, Sunee, is gorgeous. The Icelandic guy can’t seem to produce long vowel sounds, and also appears to be tone-deaf. The American is doing pretty well, but being American, everything has an American twang to it. The Korean lady cannot pronounce “f” but is generally doing well and is super earnest in her efforts.

Today was mostly focussed on pronounciation, and learning their phoenetic system. No real vocabulary at this stage. Some interesting tidbits: whereas in Australia, we might say we “got everything correct”; in Thai, you say you “got no questions wrong”. You can make any adjective a negative by adding “mai” (not) to the end of it, so you don’t need to know the word for “incorrect” if you know the work for “correct” … it’s just “not correct”.

So tomorrow Godfrey gets in super early, and I hope to have breakfast together. From there, there’ll be some work, some lazing and maybe an early lunch before I go to school at 1pm. That afternoon I was thinking swimming followed by bars. Ah, sounds sweet.