The sort-of plan

I had a pretty good vocabulary once, so I'm going to concentrate on picking that back up with seven words to learn each day. I'm keeping them in a spreadsheet which I'll upload regularly to share here, and practicing with an iphone flashcard app.

For February and March, I aim to get back into the habit of practicing vocabulary while I learn to write and read the khmer alphabet. Wikipedia has a pretty detailed article on khmer script, the upshot is: it's hard.

There are over 50 letters to learn, position counts with vowel marks, and there are several versions depending on context. Punctuation is a bit different too. When you handwrite script, you create new letters by joining letters together certain ways, so the printed script is different from handwritten.

A couple of times, I've sat with the children after class at the Riverkids' sites and copied their work. Nothing makes little kids laugh harder (except zombie chase) than an adult struggling to write the simplest alphabet!

Cambodians writing in english tend to have beautifully even script with little flourishes. My khmer is huge and blocky in comparison.

So, for the next two months, I will be practicing writing the alphabet until I am legible and I can look up simple words on my own in the Khmer-side of the dictionary. This means mixing handwritten practice with typing practice, which is important because of the Cambodian font situation.

Which sucks.

Much like Chinese, the QWERTY keyboard has to mucked about with to reflect a non-roman alphabet language. There are several Khmer fonts for the Windows crowd. I use a Mac, so tonight, I'm going to try and install a font and practice typing my first seven Khmer words.

I'll post some font links and a how-to in the next post.

Equipment!

I have several Khmer-English dictionaries. The one I have used the most, back when I first learnt Khmer and as a reference since then is the Tuttle Practical Cambodian Dictionary. The big advantage of this one is that it is very tiny and the Khmer words are indexed by an approximate english version, rather than the Khmer script. The downside is that it's tiny.

I also have the Oxford Student's Dictionary, an English-Khmer one which I'm pretty sure is a photocopy (the markets in Phnom Penh sell a lot of counterfeit books) but has a big vocabulary. The explanation of what the various khmer translations mean is in khmer, so it's limited in its usefulness for now.

I have the New Oxford Picture Dictionary in English/Cambodian. We had the Vietnamese/English one for our kids which was really helpful early on when they were learning English. I don't think I'll use this as much, but for my sons who are interested in learning Khmer, it might be useful.

And, my current favourite: the GF 386, or the CanaTech English-Khmer and Khmer-English electronic dictionary. I bought this in Phnom Penh at the Peace Bookstore, but I gather you can buy it at Sorya and the other big bookstores now. Mine cost US$190 a few months ago. Cambodian friends went through and said that the spoken translations are good. They can be hard to hear without earphones, but I find them pretty clear. Using it is a bit fiddly at first, and then the index makes sense.

I also have a small pile of Cambodian first-readers, meant for kindergarten children, a children's bible in Khmer and a pile of magazines and (thanks to my daughters) enough Cambodian pop music to sink a ship.

I have both Huffman's Modern Spoken Cambodian and the Everyday Khmer book, the two guidebooks that are most commonly used for Cambodian learners. I'm not planning to use them until April however.

Why I'm learning Khmer

2005 family photo from the Phnom Penh river

I've been working for a Cambodian NGO, Riverkids, for the past 7 years. I don't live in Cambodia but I visit fairly often and read a lot of documents translated from Khmer. Fluency would help a lot in my work.

I have four children born in Cambodia before they joined our family as well, and they speak (but can't read or write) Khmer to differing degrees. One has almost no Khmer, and I'd like him to be reasonably fluent like his siblings. My children also speak Vietnamese, and we've chosen to have them read and write in Vietnamese because the roman alphabet made it much easier for them, and they were struggling to read and write in English.

I speak very basic "market" Khmer. Years ago, when I was first in Cambodia for several months for the adoptions, I had daily lessons from a very patient teacher. I had a pretty good vocabulary and that spoken Khmer made a huge difference in communicating to my children.

So this year I'm determined to pick up my Khmer again. I want to be fluent enough to read newspaper headlines and have a decent conversation. In time, I'd like to be able to read and write in Khmer as a full second language.