is, am, and are vs. the Thai people: Language Lessons Part 1

Thai is a language without articles, without plurals, and very few prepositions. Verbs are not conjugated and when at all possible the subject of the sentence is dropped. The result is a language that relies heavily on context- you've got to be paying attention to know what you're talking about. One phrase can be used in different settings to wildly different ends. For instance "mai chai" (literally "not yes") can be used for "incorrect," "not yet," or simply "no."

So when Thais attempt English, it's the little words that take them for a ride. Filling in around the nouns and verbs can be a daunting task. But in English, until you can wield conjunctions and prepositions and phrasal verbs, you can only hack away at the bigger concepts- you can be "stuck" but not "stuck up." And so Thais approach these two and three and four letter words with an attitude that alternates between recklessness and fear. There are either too few helping words and my student gives me something raw and uncut like "I shopping sister at Robinsons." Or at the other end of the swing, there is my favorite internet cafe, where the sign over the toilet reads, "Please do not throw some tissue down upon the waters." An orgy of short words, where prepositions come in groups and inopportune plurals abound. It sounds almost biblical.

They are wary of "any" I think in part because they know the dangers of its misuse. "Some," on the other hand is a slippery one, cropping up in all kinds of speech, both casual and formal. I think my students believe they are protected by its ubiquity, and so they salt their language with it, figuring it will find its own way to the meaning of they say.

But for all the time I spend beating down the "He is have fun" and "Where do you go?" I occasionally get something like this: The other day, responding to a prompt for the word "record," my student Mun gave me the sentence, "You have a short record of social service." Humbling indeed.