Confidence - Selbstvertrauen - självförtroende - ទំនុកចិត្ត

I have come to the realization that at this moment, as I sit here in my favorite coffee shop, Noi Café, drinking my red milk tea with ice and sugar, my self-confidence and feeling a self-worth are at an all-time high.  It has been very empowering and self-affirming to be here: I’m in my homeland, doing what I came to do, doing it in large part on my own, I’m doing it because I believe in it and probably best of all, I know that it is helping my people.

My normal perspective on myself is one of disdain. Although I probably not, I think I am good at masking my self-loathing in poorly performed self-deprecating humor and obviously false-false humility that I’m not good at.

Despite my normal levels, I feel good about myself…I have a feeling it won’t last. Not because I’ll be intentionally returning to my upsetting ways…no I’m taking Khmer lessons. I’m jumping in headfirst into learning the language of my people…unfortunately, the Khmer pool isn’t deep and its filled with sharp broken glass and lime juice.

Over the course of my life, I have attempted to learn several languages with unvarying degrees of success…not so much success, more like abject failure and ruin.

After I mastereded engrish, I tries my hand with German, with three years in high school and several courses in college and grad school. I am proud to say I am almost as fluent in Deutch (German) as my dog Simba (our German Shepard mix). 

   

My next serious attempt was with American Standard Sign Language.  It was a distance class before the internet and email called a correspondence class. I received a textbook to study from and VHS video tapes in the mail every couple of weeks with videos of some yahoo doing the signs. I don’t remember if there were test or how they would work, problem was I didn’t feel the pressure of a disappointed teacher so I never did the lessons, and the tapes ended up piling up…I ended up with ten or twelve of them, that I had to send back at my expense because I kept them too long. I bet I could have been somewhat…never mind it was a bad idea from go…but I had good intentions. (I had thought about going off on a rant about the road to hell being paved with something…and the devil hiring pavers for the job…and me not really understanding how that would work…honestly, it was weird.)

My current language journey prior to Khmer, is my quest for Swedish, and for this I’m ashamed. I should be fluent by now. From our first date, Madeleine has tried to teach me Swedish, now a quarter century later, I’m still trying.

I have been on duo-lingo on a streak for over 2000 days and have done Swedish for most of them.  I have learned a lot of vocabulary and can understand a fair amount of what is being said around me when I’m in Sweden. As a bonus if a conversation about “the dog eating the cat’s food” or “the boy and the girl are eating apples” I am all in.

One thing all of these languages have in common is that they are all Germanic, (I’m actually not sure about ASL) which gives them similar structure, sounds and some common vocabulary. Although I’ve generally failed, my failures were less dramatic than they could have been, or more accurately as it is about to be.

Now I’m here in Cambodia, spending my last couple of weeks focused on learning Khmer. I am taking actual in person lessons at a school with a great reputation called Be Like Khmer. I have been super impressed with the quality of the teachers.  Each of the five I’ve worked with have been well trained, highly knowledgeable and generally fun to learn with. None of my lack of success can ever be attributed to them. 

Khmer is a Austroasiatic language with connections to Sanskrit and Pali, so not Germanic. But amazingly, I have found that the sounds of the language are familiar to me and making the sounds is not as difficult as they could be. The sentence structure isn’t too far off, but grammatically there are major differences which are hard to remember.  Lastly, with very few acceptations there aren’t many words in common with English, more French words but I don’t speak French so they might as well not exist (the French words not the French people, if you were confused).

I’ve actually been surprised how much I’m actually getting and in some conversations between other people how many words I’m recognizing.

I’ve been doing a lot of situational learning, where I learn a set of phrases and actually use them in my day to day in an actual interaction.  Once I get past my lips and tong becoming disconnected to my brain, this really has help solidify the phrases and has actually increased the number of interactions I’ve been having.  

The Khmer people really enjoy it when someone tries to speak their language. The smiles I get when I say, “let me try in Khmer,” are huge, and the giggles are genuine and not mean. Everyone is happy to help with words and pronunciation.

All things considered my Khmer ineptitude hasn’t shaken my dedication…but the counting has…Learning numbers makes me feel really stupid. 

Counting to five…not too hard…I have five fingers, and there are words for each of the first five numbers…but then things go a different direction.  Everything after five requires math.  The word for six is bpram meuy or five and one, seven is bpram pbee or five and two…and so on until ten which is dobp. Eleven starts the with some subtle nonsense, with dobp meuy, which continues the pattern but then sixteen gets nuts, dobp bpram meuy and so on and so on then each of the tens has a different term, that as far as I can tell don’t match the original numbers. If I knew that it required math just to count, I would have paid more attention in math class. I would also have tattooed the words on my fingers. 

Another thing that sets me off a little is that there is no official anglicized version of Khmer words…which is fine, they should have to put in the work for people who don’t want to learn the language as it was intended…but everyone has their own way of phonetically spelling things.  So the word for I/me is knyom but can be spelled kynyoum, knyoum, knoum, k’nyom…ok, if you have the time and patience to figure it out, I rarely give myself the time and I have not patien

If you are phonetic reader, not a problem…I however am not, so that’s a fun bag of spiders…and not the one that are deep fried and well-seasoned. These are those confident ones who chase you and bark at you.  The ones who believe they are powerful and vibrate with self-confidence…I hate that kind of spider…such show-offs.