Language School 102

 Reviewing my early journals, one might think we went to Thailand to evaluate anti-diarrhea medications as we were relying on them heavily to get through the day. So it was, fortified by Lomotil and Pepto Bismol and bolstered by all the determination we could muster, we made the first of what would be many treks to Union Language School (ULS) on November 17, 1982.

Our Korean Friends Performing for the
ULS Christmas Program - 1982

The most memorable of our classmates that started the same time we did were two Korean couples. At first, we were in awe and intimidated by them as they’d had some basic Thai instruction before arriving in Thailand. We could only dream of saying “What’s your name?’ and “Where’s the bathroom?” and they could already do it! I know some complained that ULS was too “competitive”, but for me at least, it was good to have others I saw as “ahead” of me as it was something to aim for. After a couple months we all seemed to be evenly inept at Thai so I’m not sure in the long-run if the pre-arrival classes helped.

According to ULS, a trend in language learning is women often do better in the classes than the men. The men however, may in the long term be better Thai speakers as gender roles of the time meant the men would be out in the public more, therefore using Thai more and therefore building up their Thai ability more. True or not, spouses were separated and sent to different classes which I suspect saved many marriages. So over the months of ULS, Marcia and I would not be in the same class but we would have class with various mixes of the Korean couples and we got to know them well.

In the Thai classes the teachers had to think up various topics we students could talk about in our pre-elementary Thai. Sometimes, the subject of the day would be to talk about our home country.  I don’t recall having any other Americans in our classes so we were free to say whatever we liked about the USA and no one would dispute it. The two Korean couples however, were apparently from different parts of Korea and often had different ideas about what Korea was like. Whenever the class discussion was about our home country one Korean would start to say something about Korea only to have the other Korean shake their head, or otherwise display their displeasure. When their turn came to speak it was usually something to the effect of, ”What are you talking about? Korea is nothing like that!”. Then they would launch into the “corrected” version. I’m not sure what we learned about Korea, but it was entertaining. Fortunately too, everyone usually left as friends.

Language school let out for the day around lunch time so we soon struck up a deal that if the Korean couples would feed us lunch, we would teach them English. I think we did this for three days a week. Hopefully they learned a little English, but I know for certain we enjoyed the lunches.

One of the main goals of ULS was to get their students out in the general public conversing in Thai with real, Thai people. So, our home work from the get-go was to go and ask 4 – 5 people some question. One of the early questions was “What is your name?”. We dutifully went around asking the question but it lead to some dead end conversations.

Marcia getting some feedback from Khru
(Teacher) Apple in class at ULS

Us: What is your name?

Them: My name is Prasert

Us: …….(in English now) Ummm….Uhhhhh…….Goodbye, Thanks!

Them: (Thinking to themselves) That was weird!

Of course, it got better as time went on and we were amazed that these strange sounds we were making even worked at all. But “lo and behold” we were making our way through the program. We were far from brilliant Thai speakers by the time we finished ULS but it gave us a base to build on and we eventually got pretty comfortable speaking and understanding Thai.