How long does it take to learn Cambodian?
Where do you live? I am Cambodian and I thought I can teach you Khmer language and I won't charge you because I want some teaching experience.
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- I live above an internet cafe
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I have been studying for 3 years in October and am still not particularly great. I think it is never truly learned; you just reach certain levels at which you feel "okay" with it.
- Miguelito
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I completely agree with the speaking/understanding part. It’s the first language I’ve studied that I have a harder time understanding than speaking myself. Of course, there are also times I say what I think is very basic and they can’t understand me either haha.youngwill100 wrote:I just wanted to learn basic spoken khmer. I had three hours a week of lessons with an excellent tutor for three months and then just noted down new words in my phone as i heard them and asked what they meant. Having a khmer girlfriend who spoke very basic English also helped a lot, forcing me to learn khmer faster.
I think I could deal with most situations within about five months of starting to learn.
Understanding spoken khmer is another story. The locals in Phnom Penh use a lot of slang and different pronunciations which made it hard to understand people's responses, especially if they were speaking fast.
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- Marinaris
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I have the same feeling with englishMiguelito wrote:I completely agree with the speaking/understanding part. It’s the first language I’ve studied that I have a harder time understanding than speaking myself. Of course, there are also times I say what I think is very basic and they can’t understand me either haha.youngwill100 wrote:I just wanted to learn basic spoken khmer. I had three hours a week of lessons with an excellent tutor for three months and then just noted down new words in my phone as i heard them and asked what they meant. Having a khmer girlfriend who spoke very basic English also helped a lot, forcing me to learn khmer faster.
I think I could deal with most situations within about five months of starting to learn.
Understanding spoken khmer is another story. The locals in Phnom Penh use a lot of slang and different pronunciations which made it hard to understand people's responses, especially if they were speaking fast.
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- ផោមក្លិនស្អុយ
- Daylight, I need Daylight !?!
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I don’t get this at all.Miguelito wrote:I completely agree with the speaking/understanding part. It’s the first language I’ve studied that I have a harder time understanding than speaking myself. Of course, there are also times I say what I think is very basic and they can’t understand me either haha.youngwill100 wrote:I just wanted to learn basic spoken khmer. I had three hours a week of lessons with an excellent tutor for three months and then just noted down new words in my phone as i heard them and asked what they meant. Having a khmer girlfriend who spoke very basic English also helped a lot, forcing me to learn khmer faster.
I think I could deal with most situations within about five months of starting to learn.
Understanding spoken khmer is another story. The locals in Phnom Penh use a lot of slang and different pronunciations which made it hard to understand people's responses, especially if they were speaking fast.
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For me understanding is always greater than participation. It’s the old ‘passive versus active vocabulary’ thing. I’ve got decent Khmer ability but there are loads of words which I know when I hear them, but when I am speaking I just can’t remember them.
I have been fairly immersed in the language though with people from all over the country. Maybe that makes a difference.
The more you know, the more you realize there's more to learn. isn't it all about that?ផោមក្លិនស្អុយ wrote:I don’t get this at all.Miguelito wrote:I completely agree with the speaking/understanding part. It’s the first language I’ve studied that I have a harder time understanding than speaking myself. Of course, there are also times I say what I think is very basic and they can’t understand me either haha.youngwill100 wrote:I just wanted to learn basic spoken khmer. I had three hours a week of lessons with an excellent tutor for three months and then just noted down new words in my phone as i heard them and asked what they meant. Having a khmer girlfriend who spoke very basic English also helped a lot, forcing me to learn khmer faster.
I think I could deal with most situations within about five months of starting to learn.
Understanding spoken khmer is another story. The locals in Phnom Penh use a lot of slang and different pronunciations which made it hard to understand people's responses, especially if they were speaking fast.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
For me understanding is always greater than participation. It’s the old ‘passive versus active vocabulary’ thing. I’ve got decent Khmer ability but there are loads of words which I know when I hear them, but when I am speaking I just can’t remember them.
I have been fairly immersed in the language though with people from all over the country. Maybe that makes a difference.
Kind of the Khmer tale about the frog in the well.
How long is a piece of string? I don't know.
How difficult it is to learn another language depends on a lot of factors, but one of the most important factors is how much you need to. If you speak English well, you can go almost anywhere in the world and there will be some people who understand you. But if English is the only language you speak, you might even have difficulty with different accents, and you won't understand people who are just learning English.
I have been learning Khmer for only 3 months, but I have been studying very hard. This is my experience so far....
I went to Cambodia for 1 month. I found a book called "Practical Cambodian Dictionary". I found someone from Canada who speaks Khmer well and loves teaching Khmer. But after learning all the "common phrases", I still couldn't understand anyone. I lived in a shop and the girls who work there could not speak any English, or understand me when I tried phrases in Khmer. After a month in Malaysia, I had some comprehension and I could form sentences in Malay, so I wondered why Khmer seemed so difficult. It is because basic simplified Malay is used as a lingua franca by millions of people in Indonesia, so Malays, think it is worth teaching to foreigners. Malays are also very proud of their hospitality because it says in the Koran "if a foreigner in your country is lost, you must take care of them until they have found their way." Malays are also proud that a lot of them speak English well, can use big words, and even have a "British" accent. Also, Malay is written in Roman letters most of the time, the sounds correspond closely with sounds in English, and there are only 6 contrasting vowel sounds. (English has 9 and Khmer 10).
I grew up speaking two languages, English, and Warlpiri which is a central desert language of Australia. Warlpiri has literally only 3 contrasting vowel sounds (that's all you need really), which correspond very closely with 3 of the Malay vowel sounds, so I could already "hear" all the sounds they make. Malay and Warlpiri are similar in some ways, and many words can be made by adding suffixes (and prefixes in Malay) to existing words. The rules of grammar are consistently applied.
So Khmer is not considered easy to teach to foreigners, hospitality is not a national pastime in Cambodia as it is in Malaysia, Cambodians are 90% mono-linguistic and therefore most of them find it difficult to learn English and understand "bad" accents, Khmer is written in a different script so if you don't learn it you can't practice by reading signs, Khmer vowels, and even some consonants do not correspond with English sounds, and the grammar is so complicated it seems inconsistent. (For example the same affix could have multiple functions).
But I didn't give up, instead I decided to take a new approach. The breakthrough came when I decided to learn the Khmer script. This made me realized how many different sounds are made in Khmer. Khmer has many spelling rules, and a lot of characters, but once you learn them it is very consistent compared to English. Here is a vowel chart...
Compare it to these vowel charts for English...
I hope this helps you. Now I can hear and contrast all the sounds in Khmer, so I can distinguish between words that are similar, and when I work hard at writing down Khmer song lyrics, I can use the Practical Cambodian Dictionary to get a sort of translation. I also watch Khmer TV series (with English subtitles), and they are much more entertaining than Australian TV. They never let you get comfortable. Just when everything seems to be going well, tragedy strikes! On the positive side, Khmer has a lot of similarities to English in the Grammar and is generally a subject–verb–object (SVO) language. It is not tonal like Thai and Vietnamese, and doesn't have genders for every noun like German. Remember to put the adjectives after the nouns (as in French), and keep in mind that a lot of words can be used in different ways to mean different things. Begin Learning Khmer script here... http://www.pratyeka.org/csw/hlp-csw.pdf
Here is an interesting map.
How difficult it is to learn another language depends on a lot of factors, but one of the most important factors is how much you need to. If you speak English well, you can go almost anywhere in the world and there will be some people who understand you. But if English is the only language you speak, you might even have difficulty with different accents, and you won't understand people who are just learning English.
I have been learning Khmer for only 3 months, but I have been studying very hard. This is my experience so far....
I went to Cambodia for 1 month. I found a book called "Practical Cambodian Dictionary". I found someone from Canada who speaks Khmer well and loves teaching Khmer. But after learning all the "common phrases", I still couldn't understand anyone. I lived in a shop and the girls who work there could not speak any English, or understand me when I tried phrases in Khmer. After a month in Malaysia, I had some comprehension and I could form sentences in Malay, so I wondered why Khmer seemed so difficult. It is because basic simplified Malay is used as a lingua franca by millions of people in Indonesia, so Malays, think it is worth teaching to foreigners. Malays are also very proud of their hospitality because it says in the Koran "if a foreigner in your country is lost, you must take care of them until they have found their way." Malays are also proud that a lot of them speak English well, can use big words, and even have a "British" accent. Also, Malay is written in Roman letters most of the time, the sounds correspond closely with sounds in English, and there are only 6 contrasting vowel sounds. (English has 9 and Khmer 10).
I grew up speaking two languages, English, and Warlpiri which is a central desert language of Australia. Warlpiri has literally only 3 contrasting vowel sounds (that's all you need really), which correspond very closely with 3 of the Malay vowel sounds, so I could already "hear" all the sounds they make. Malay and Warlpiri are similar in some ways, and many words can be made by adding suffixes (and prefixes in Malay) to existing words. The rules of grammar are consistently applied.
So Khmer is not considered easy to teach to foreigners, hospitality is not a national pastime in Cambodia as it is in Malaysia, Cambodians are 90% mono-linguistic and therefore most of them find it difficult to learn English and understand "bad" accents, Khmer is written in a different script so if you don't learn it you can't practice by reading signs, Khmer vowels, and even some consonants do not correspond with English sounds, and the grammar is so complicated it seems inconsistent. (For example the same affix could have multiple functions).
But I didn't give up, instead I decided to take a new approach. The breakthrough came when I decided to learn the Khmer script. This made me realized how many different sounds are made in Khmer. Khmer has many spelling rules, and a lot of characters, but once you learn them it is very consistent compared to English. Here is a vowel chart...
Compare it to these vowel charts for English...
I hope this helps you. Now I can hear and contrast all the sounds in Khmer, so I can distinguish between words that are similar, and when I work hard at writing down Khmer song lyrics, I can use the Practical Cambodian Dictionary to get a sort of translation. I also watch Khmer TV series (with English subtitles), and they are much more entertaining than Australian TV. They never let you get comfortable. Just when everything seems to be going well, tragedy strikes! On the positive side, Khmer has a lot of similarities to English in the Grammar and is generally a subject–verb–object (SVO) language. It is not tonal like Thai and Vietnamese, and doesn't have genders for every noun like German. Remember to put the adjectives after the nouns (as in French), and keep in mind that a lot of words can be used in different ways to mean different things. Begin Learning Khmer script here... http://www.pratyeka.org/csw/hlp-csw.pdf
Here is an interesting map.
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I like it very challenging so although nowadays people can and will use the internet ( I wish these to be helpful for you and whomever attempts to learn either languages, with ASEAN bringing new standards...)
https://download.cnet.com/s/english-khmer-dictionary/ *this will help those with more ancient phones, I know it's not always simple to have the brand new ones which are costly and new apps demand new phones, these are compatible with previous models and will satisfy tighter budgets; most of them are free*
For those that fancy Français, this was a very interesting dictionary from the before last century ( 1886 actually)
https://archive.org/details/abn6261.000 ... du/page/n8
Best of luck to you all
https://download.cnet.com/s/english-khmer-dictionary/ *this will help those with more ancient phones, I know it's not always simple to have the brand new ones which are costly and new apps demand new phones, these are compatible with previous models and will satisfy tighter budgets; most of them are free*
For those that fancy Français, this was a very interesting dictionary from the before last century ( 1886 actually)
https://archive.org/details/abn6261.000 ... du/page/n8
Best of luck to you all
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where do you live ?
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I am not Cambodian, and have never been to Cambodia (I hope to visit Cambodia someday with my oldest son, whose mother is Cambodian). I studied the Khmer script diligently everyday, starting late 1980, and mastered the Khmer alphabet in around five months, at which time I was reading the Khmer Bible, beginning to sing hymns from the Cambodian Hymn Book.
After around 18 months of continuously learning Khmer, I was able to interpret at church, for the police, medical, doctor, and have good conversations with Cambodian people. I lived with several Cambodian families from around 1981-1986, which helped tremendously to improve fluency. I also had many Cambodian friends at college, and worked with Cambodians. So, I had a lot of exposure to the people and language.
I lost contact with the Cambodian people for many years, and only recently have started reviewing the Khmer language, and connecting with people online ..... I'm surprised at how much I remember, but have forgotten so much. I need to find people to practice speaking and also writing/typing in Khmer .... Anyone interested, contact me .....
After around 18 months of continuously learning Khmer, I was able to interpret at church, for the police, medical, doctor, and have good conversations with Cambodian people. I lived with several Cambodian families from around 1981-1986, which helped tremendously to improve fluency. I also had many Cambodian friends at college, and worked with Cambodians. So, I had a lot of exposure to the people and language.
I lost contact with the Cambodian people for many years, and only recently have started reviewing the Khmer language, and connecting with people online ..... I'm surprised at how much I remember, but have forgotten so much. I need to find people to practice speaking and also writing/typing in Khmer .... Anyone interested, contact me .....
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If you learn the Khmer script fluently, that will help you to reach a much higher level of fluency. Especially helpful with learning to pronounce the language more accurately. Practice reading Khmer (in the Khmer script) and also practice writing in the Khmer script. Expose yourself to different media > books > newspapers > audio and video news, music .... And of course, you need to practice in person with fluent speakers of Khmer.
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