A week ago today, Jentana came in person to our condo to interview us and arranged to start our lessons that same afternoon. As you can probably tell from this picture, Jentana has an outgoing personality and a great sense of humor. Plus she is geng maak, very smart. We got along so well that an appointment scheduled for 30 minutes turned into 3 hours! We had a delicious lunch together across the road from our condo at one of the many open-air restaurants to be found on any street in Bangkok.

Khun Jentana invited us to see her school and meet her family on Friday while we waited for Da and Poen to catch up with us. That’s when we took this picture.

Over the past week we have taken five three-hour lessons in speaking, reading, and writing. Here we are with our teacher, Khun Taai, who came to our place to deliver our lessons. She was a strict taskmaster and wouldn’t let us get away with incomplete sentences or sloppy pronunciation. Pronunciation isn’t easy in a tonal language such as Thai, in which five words with different meanings can sound exactly the same to American ears, so we needed her torture. She also gave plenty of homework. I felt like I was back in eighth grade with Mrs. Leota Brown, to whom I will always be grateful for my very useful ability to diagram sentences. We still have a long way to go to complete the course, but we have made a good start. We have fun asking street vendors things like “plaa raakhaa thaorai kah” (what’s the price of the fish) and saying “yindii thii dai ruujak” at parties (nice to meet you).

The best part of spending all the livelong day learning Thai has been the fun speaking with Da and Poen. On their precious days off and after they get home from work at night, we’ve had a chance to practice our lessons while they’ve practiced their English. Don’t tell Khun Taai, but Da’s still my favorite teacher.