Khmer: A Learning Adventure

For 2 years, I studied Khmer with a private tutor.  For fun.

You know, it was a chaotic world that I had to fight every single day.  I was sick and struggling and had little control of my life, and the world seemed very hard and brutal.  Khmer lessons were my one little place where I could just talk nonsense, make mistakes and not suffer for it, talk to friendly people, just relax and be happy.  It was my one lifeline to humanity, in short.

I never progressed much, because we rushed through 4 or 5 books in a year....though they never printed more 5th level books for the remainder of my time there.  So I just spoke about my life and ideas using simple language and never really got anywhere.

Just one hour, every day.

Just like a fool, I never learned to read.  I just didn't want to--my faith in reading and writing has diminished ever since I studied languages in high school and college.  Experience shows that it tends to result in people relying on written notes and not being able to speak the damn language.

But now I'm learning to read and write.  I'm glad I am.  It's just like being a kid again--I realize that all these words are spelled differently than I expected.

Like as a 3 year old learning to spell (yes, I begged my mom to teach me to read and write when I was 3), I was pretty sure it was written,

hte bran fox jumpt in hte wodr

When I went was in the first grade, I learned to my amazement that it's

The brown fox jumped in the water.

Same with Khmer.  It's...not spelled like I thought it would be.  There are double letters on the end of words.  Silent -e's that change the internal vowel sound and other letters on the end.  Like English.  Things literally transliterated as -ette, with the -te being unpronounced. Like English.  Silent m's.  The rules are sometimes bent, and if you don't know the word, you might not be able to guess it.  It's one of the few languages where kids have spelling tests throughout school...just like English.

Worse, there are old letters people still sometimes use.  Like how English has ae and oe merged as dipthongs...you sometimes find them in older publications...you know the ones: 

These old-fashioned letters, in addition to the approximately 60 "core" letters...in addition to diacritic marks....in addition to variations on the core letters that are written beneath other letters to form a consonant cluster...

This isn't even all of them...I promise

Well take the word "khnyom", which means the personal pronoun "I" in some contexts.

It's written,

That's literally like writing,

FUCK.

Most words are like this.  I am really glad I did not attempt this before.  Prospective learners should make a mental note not to try this at home.