26 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3 4
maungmaung
Tetraglot
Newbie
Myanmar
Joined 4755 days ago
7 posts - 11 votes
Speaks: Burmese*, EnglishC2, Spanish, Mandarin
Studies: French
| Message 25 of 26 30 November 2012 at 8:48am | IP Logged |
I am from Myanmar and I would like to add that what Simon wrote above is essentially
correct. 50 years of centralized education has made the entire country uniform
language-wise. Only villagers from isolated areas would still speak only their minority
language.
Every minority member I recall meeting in Yangon or Mandalay can speak 100% fluent
Burmese.
simon43 wrote:
Reactivating this old thread :)
Almost all Burmese people can speak the national language of Burmese. The exceptions
are likely to be the elderly from isolated villages. Many Burmese people also speak an
minority language, such as Karen, Shan or Mon, and prefer to use that language within
their family and village circles, (similar to the Issan region of north-east Thailand
where Issan-Lao is the primary spoken language, but where everyone is fluent in Thai).
So learning a Burmese minority language (as opposed to learning Burmese), is really
only useful if you want to interact on a close (and polite) level with those
communities - they will surely understand if you only speak Burmese.
Learning Thai is also good for the country of Laos, not only because of some close
similarities between Thai and Lao, but because most Lao people prefer to watch Thai TV
(their own TV channels seem rather boring!). Where-ever I travel in Laos, people will
speak to me in Lao (I understand Lao because my wife is Issan-Lao), but I then reply in
Thai and I'm fully understood.
Simon |
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Edited by maungmaung on 30 November 2012 at 8:48am
2 persons have voted this message useful
| clumsy
Octoglot
Senior Member
Poland
lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5212 days ago
1116 posts - 1367 votes 
Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese
Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish
Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi
| Message 26 of 26 01 December 2012 at 1:07am | IP Logged |
Fat-tony wrote:
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
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If one can read Chinese there are some books published in China on Hani, Lisu, Wa and so on.
They are of course made for the dialects spoken in China.
http://book.chaoxing.com/ebook/list_1520.html
1 person has voted this message useful
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