Khmer vowels and consonants on the iPhone

After considering jailbreaking my iPhone so I could install Khmer fonts on it, I decided to wait until May. I'm heading up around then, and will be able to get it done by one of the experts at Surya as well as pick up some more Khmer software.

In the meantime, I found and bought two small apps, both by the same guy, Phal Ngim, who has quite a few small iPhone apps. I had his iSpeakKhmer which is decent for phrases but was very basic tourist stuff that I already know.

iKhmerABC and iKhmerVowel are each $0.99 and are basically flashcards and an overview screen. They're nicely done and the pronunciation is clear.

I'll be using this over the next couple of weeks to memorize the alphabet. I'm not quite sure what the best way to learn it is - probably flashcards and practice handwriting.

Right now, as I struggle with the keyboard, I'm muttering "the little basket with the fish hooks, now the dancing ribbon..."

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.