School days

Learning the Khmyer language continues to be our daily challenge. We truck off to see Nimol from 9.30-10.30am on Mondays, Wednesdays and Friday. She's great and patient - and I feel clumsy and stupid! Learning one-off words is OK but the art of stringing words together into intellible sentences is a challenge! Sue and I then work on it together most days - the blind leading the blind very often!

We are having fun ... we are having fun learning ...

Khmyer has 33 consonants and 23 vowels. Helpfully, the 23 vowels can each have two inflections, so there is more like 46 of them - a far cry from 'a-e-i-o-u'. The actual script is not Roman (as in a,b,c ...) but a little more challenging

What we are not learning yet - Khmyer script. The writing is based on the ancient Brahmi script of southern India. It is arguably one of the oldest languages in SE Asia.

Some of the language is OK to get a handle on. Counting, for example, goes 12345; then 5-1, 5-2 etc up to 10; then start over. So 19, for example is dop-pram-bunn (10-5-4). Months are kai then the month, so March is month 3. Then, just as I get happy, I discover that 'grapes' are 'plae dambangbai chew'. The good news is that, being imported and US$5/kilo, 'plae dambangbai chew' are not too common in every-day conversation.