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Khmer vs Burmese vs Thai vs Vietnamese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6174 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 9 of 26 05 June 2010 at 8:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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None of the languages could be considered easy. Thai, Khmer and Vietnamese all have
isolating grammar, similar to Chinese, while Burmese is an agglutinative SOV quite similar to Turkish, Korean or Japanese. In terms of script, Vietnamese is very easy although it looks somewhat busy with all those diacritics. The others are all pretty difficult with their own quirks (cf "Most difficult alphabet" thread pg.4). Khmer is non-tonal but does have some odd clusters, while the Burmese tonal system is unlike Thai and Vietnamese in that it depends on relative pitch and manner of articulation (it sounds a bit like French). In terms of vocab, don't expect a great deal of help from European languages. Although most very recent arrivals have English names (CD, DVD, computer etc); lots of other pan-European vocab (president, economics, television etc) are covered by Sanskrit, Chinese or indigenous terms. To make matters worse even recent loans can be obscured because of the very different phonetic patterns e.g. football becomes "born" in Thai (from ball). I'd like to add to my quote above that Thai is maybe marginally more useful around S-E Asia because of the large number of migrant workers who then return to their native country. Certainly my (Thai) wife has always bumped into people who speak very good Thai when we've travelled around the region. Dealing with the hill-tribes is difficult. Most villages will now have some-one who speaks at least Northern Thai, but each group has its own distinct language and I don't think that learning standard Burmese would be much use (although better than nothing, of course). However two of my brothers-in-law live in a remote "Black" Lahu village near Fang (a bit of a mid-life crisis for both of them, IMHO) and get by exclusively in Thai. I've struggled to find any kind of resources for these languages (Akha, Lisu, Lahu, Karen etc). There's a lonely planet phrase book but I've yet to try out any of the phrases on our Akha/Lisu friends. Anything I could find tended to be aimed at teaching literacy to the natives or rather old. Karen Sgaw - http://drumpublications.org/ Akha - http://www.akha.org/content/language/index.html Lisu - http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022354462 13 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| zhiguli Senior Member Canada Joined 6475 days ago 176 posts - 221 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Mandarin | Message 10 of 26 06 June 2010 at 2:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Not much to add, but if you're allergic to tones like I am you might consider learning Khmer. It also has a good amount of cross-over with Thai (tons of common vocabulary, Khmer-derived alphabet, etc) should you decide to learn that later on. Burmese has somewhat less in common with these two languages (Sanskrit/Pali-derived vocabulary, Indic-derived alphabet, but otherwise quite different grammatically/lexically) and Vietnamese almost none at all (a small number of cognates with Khmer, which are often obscured by phonetic changes - higher vocabulary comes mainly from Classical Chinese).
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| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6263 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 11 of 26 06 June 2010 at 5:45pm | IP Logged | ||
Wow, very interesting. It blows my mind how four countries in such close proximity have evolved such dramatically different languages. And who would have thought that of all of them, Thai would be the closest thing to a "lingua franca" of the region. ( I guess I would have predicted Vietnamese ) I went through a few units of Contemporary Cambodian and FSI Cambodian. I don't know if it's just me but I can't make heads or tails out of what they are saying! Even with the transcripts. It's true, Cambodian doesn't have tones, but the subtleties of the 35 different vowel combinations? I personally find the tones of Thai and Vietnamese MUCH easier to understand. ( The Cambodia assignment is kind of a longshot anyway...) I also listened to a few chapters of Burmese By Ear on the SOAS website. What a beautiful sounding language! Not at all what I expected, plus, I just love the term "creaky tone" . But Burmese doesn't make a lot of sense for me to pick up since I won't be going to Myanmar proper and it probably wont help much if I get the hill-tribe assignment... Which leaves Vietnamese and Thai. I do want to clarify from my original post. When I said speak at FSI/DLI level 2, I actually meant speak at a Level 2 ILR level of proficiency: Speaking 2+ (Limited Working Proficiency, Plus) Able to satisfy most work requirements with language usage that is often, but not always, acceptable and effective. The individual shows considerable ability to communicate effectively on topics relating to particular interests and special fields of competence. Often shows a high degree of fluency and ease of speech, yet when under tension or pressure, the ability to use the language effectively may deteriorate. Comprehension of normal native speech is typically nearly complete. The individual may miss cultural and local references and may require a native speaker to adjust to his/her limitations in some ways. Native speakers often perceive the individual's speech to contain awkward or inaccurate phrasing of ideas, mistaken time, space and person references, or to be in some way inappropriate, if not strictly incorrect. from http://www.govtilr.org. Sorry for the confusion. Side note for Fat Tony: You don't happen to have access to any DLI Thai do you?? :-) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| zhiguli Senior Member Canada Joined 6475 days ago 176 posts - 221 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Mandarin | Message 12 of 26 06 June 2010 at 8:05pm | IP Logged | ||
I hadn't thought about this. It's true that the colloquial pronunciation (as found in the FSI audio) is a very abbreviated and "distorted" version of the literary (things like "təəp nıŋ" becoming "təəm" and so on). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| maaku Senior Member United States Joined 5608 days ago 359 posts - 562 votes Speaks: English* | Message 13 of 26 06 June 2010 at 9:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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DLI/JLU has very short familiarization courses for the south-east Asian languages (and many other rare languages in hotspot areas), but they are not very comprehensive. It's pretty much a phrase book for special forces. Good starting point though, but the courses are web based and behind a firewall. I haven't considered what it would take to download the material (and before anyone asks, I won't: I'd like to keep my job and not go to jail, thank you very much).
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6263 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 14 of 26 07 June 2010 at 12:47pm | IP Logged | ||
Yeah, I've seen these. There is a guy selling them on ebay for $15 a course. They actually do seem pretty decent for basic situations and vocabulary. They do have Khmer and Burmese as well. Fat Tony has made many of the texts available (they are public domain so don't worry, nobody is going to jail) on the DLI Links post. But for now if you want the audio, you gotta go to ebay... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6174 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 15 of 26 09 June 2010 at 11:08pm | IP Logged | ||
AFAIK, there's no DLI Thai. There are, however, some useful resources compiled by an American "agency" in the library at work. Unfortunately they have "for official use only" stamped all over them so I can't scan them in. But I was thinking of typing them up (a newspaper reader and a very good grammatical overview of some commonly-used multi function words) and adding my own, more up-to-date examples. As an aside, the FSI courses seem to be a good starting point but the target language (not sure about Khmer but Thai, Lao (if you're interested) and Vietnamese in particular) tends to be quite stilted and certainly the tones are almost over- emphasised. For sure the tones are quite clear in everyday Thai (more so than Mandarin) but there's also an element of sentence intonation that seems to be ignored in the FSI courses. The result is that the speech on the tapes sound somewhat robotic. Still a very good starting point but something to look out for when you want to sound more like a serious language learner (which you probably are) rather than a mildly-interested tourist. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| BlondGirl Groupie United States Joined 5591 days ago 49 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 16 of 26 12 June 2010 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just want to throw in my own 2 cents here. I live in Houston and we have had a significant number of Burmese immigrants here (all over Texas, from the panhandle to the coast). This has occurred in the last year and interpreters are almost non-existent. Most of the ones I have interacted with have no one to help them communicate and their English is nil.
Whatever you decide, you might want to check into the refugee populations that are moving into your area to see what would be the most useful to you and to the community around you. (If it were me, here where I live, I'd go with Burmese, hands down--we have tons of Vietnamese already and Thai translators already, plus, in a pinch, those are available in several online translators. Burmese has nothing online hardly at all so I have to often resort to a "universal" point chart translator with patients. Khmer is not a language that I have seen more than once in 15 years here in my own community.) I know that it is hard to predict what group will be heading for your area, but if you can find a way to determine that--good luck! 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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