In the first part of this post we went through some of the types of menus you may encounter when in Thailand and touched on some of the variations in dishes you will see, depending on where in the country you are.
There are a few “common denominators” that seem to traverse all regions and all Thai menus, which you can find wherever you are – and that’s our focus today. If you have even a passing knowledge of Thai food, a few of these five dishes should get your taste buds going.
Living in Thailand, working and socialising with Thais as I do, food is a topic never far away from people’s lips (forgive the pun.) In fact I have often been sitting around a table with a group of Thais, waiting for lunch, while they enthusiastically discuss what they will eat for dinner.
If you’ve ever been here on holiday you will have caught glimpses of the importance of food in everyday Thai life – from the noodle seller on the corner of every street to the itinerant fried banana, fresh fruit or dried squid seller around town, to the smells of freshly cooked food emanating from the night markets.
Preparing, making, packaging, cooking and selling food is a big part of life, as it is in much of south-east Asia.
I have lived in Thailand for just over nine years and I made it an early goal to at least have a working knowledge of the Thai language.
A large part of my time here has been working with the English language in some form or other; for several years as an English teacher in a local secondary school and as a private tutor; and in the past couple of years as a professional writer.
But I, like many English people, do not have a natural gift for learning new languages. I have in the past studied French (at school) and Spanish (at University) and I took quite well to the latter, but if there was such a thing as an Olympic Language Race I would come in somewhere near the back, just behind an average 7-year-old European student.
An often asked question is whether it is possible to learn an Asian language without learning the script. It’s understandable to ask this question, because learning Chinese and Japanese script seems a daunting task, especially if you don’t know a single character.
My answer to this question is that it depends on how you want to use the language after you have learnt it. You don’t need any special intelligence to learn Chinese or Japanese characters, it just requires a lot of patience and persistance before your efforts pay off. For example, I have been learning simplified Chinese script for about 4 years now, and yet not comfortable opening a newspaper. I can read a menu, write a simple text myself, but still miss too many words to be able to read a newspaper article.
If you have little time
So if you are planning to pick up a bit of Chinese or Japanese for interaction during a trip there, don’t bother with learning a lot of characters. Just pick up hanyu pinyin or romanji and learn the phrases you are most likely to use in everyday communication, and go for it. You won’t see much results from learning characters in the first few months, so spend that time on getting to speak.
If you really want to become fluent in Chinese or Japanese
But if you want to move beyond the basics, there is really no avoiding in learning the characters. They form the basics of the language. Romanized forms of Japanese and Mandarin are learning aids and you won’t meet them in daily life. When you move beyond the straightforward words and get to learn more complicated vocabulary, everything will look the same, and the characters will be a welcome way to distinguish between the different words.
Now, if you first ‘had little time’ and skipped over the characters and find yourself banging into a wall, you will have to backtrack a bit and take a reading and writing course to let your writing catch up with your spoken language.
For other Asian languages such as Thai, Korean, Tamil, Bengali
While these languages use non-Latin symbols in written language, they follow a phonetic system with a limited number of characters, just like English and other European languages do. This means that while it may look scary, you can actually learn how to read the language with a couple of weeks of practice, and you should definitely do it when you start learning the language at first.
Learning to read the new language will be much faster then when you first started to read and write, because as a child you were learning both the concept of written text and the symbols. Your brains are already trained to read now. So you just need to substitute the letters. You’ll be surprised how fast this goes when you set your mind to it.
