I am back in Thailand. I sure have to get used to people not understanding English after having been in New Zealand and Australia for more than a month. Yesterday I tried to go to ‘the rose garden’, a place 10 kilometers outside Bangkok where they perform traditional dances and such. After having caught a bus to the Southern terminal, I got stranded. Nobody, not even information, spoke English and so nobody could tell me which bus to take from there. After twenty minutes I realized I was really stuck. I called my hostel and asked them to tell someone from information in Thai where I wanted to go to. I was then told which bus I needed to take, but nobody accompanied me to the bus, so as soon as I got on the bus the same thing happened. I tried to explain I wanted to go to ‘the rose garden’, mimicking smelling roses and all, and I thought they had understood. Well they clearly hadn’t, as one hour later I was about 60 kilometers outside Bangkok and kicked out of the bus, as it was the terminal, unceremoniously.
Whilst I sat on that bus for sixty minutes I started thinking about how I had learned English. My earliest memory of me trying to speak English is when I am about eight years old and playing ‘Batman and Robin’ with my brother. The Batman and Robin we watched on tv spoke English, therefore, we needed to speak English. The problem was that apart from ‘yes’ and ’no’ we didn’t know any English words. Our solution was to speak Dutch with an English accent and to use the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’ A LOT.
During primary school I didn’t have any English lessons. When I was twelve our teacher did show us a video that was supposed to teach us English. He himself left the room. The video was called ‘the lost druid’. I remember the title clearly, as we were made to watch it at least five times. I didn’t mind, as I liked ‘the lost druid’, although it failed to teach me any English. At the end of that year, which was my final year of primary school, the teacher bought a new video. I don’t know what that one was called as I only watched it once, but it was about aliens coming to earth. This video taught me the English alphabet though, as the aliens kept singing it and I am very good at remembering songs.
English was obligatory all the way through secondary school. Although I later studied English at university, it wasn’t love at first sight. I really hated the subject in the beginning. My English teacher, from Indonesia, kept speaking very fast in a language I didn’t understand and expected me to keep up. Apart from the alphabet and ‘yes’ and ‘no’, I didn’t understand what she was on about. I really couldn’t keep up and always failed my tests miserably. I was so bad that my teacher actually advised me to concentrate on my other subjects as English clearly wasn’t for me.
So, I struggled on, because I had to do the final exam. I didn’t enjoy it one bit until I passed the ‘MAVO’ and started the ‘HAVO’ (the Dutch educational system is too complicated to explain here to people who are unfamiliar with it, but I was 16 and began a higher level of secondary education after passing that exam). I got a different teacher and he introduced me to English literature. Now, I had always enjoyed reading, but up to that point all the books I had read were either Dutch or English, German or French books that were written in baby language and therefore not a pleasure to read, to put it mildly. This teacher, however, introduced me to Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and many other wonderful writers. I loved reading these books. The style of them was so different from the Dutch books I had read up till then. But, I needed to build up my vocabulary and my English in general in order to understand them. I started making lists while I was reading, I translated my favorite songs, and I also, and this is a bit embarrassing, started to have fake conversations out loud in English with myself! It did work though, because my English classes were finally starting to make sense and my grades went up. When I finished secondary school my average for English had gone up to an eight (out of ten).
I remember I went to Scotland that summer. I was eighteen and it was the first time I really went abroad alone. I quickly found out that the English I had learned in the classroom was nothing like the English spoken by native speakers. Everybody spoke very fast and, even worse, they pronounced words in such a strange way. I immediately felt like the thirteen year old listening to her Indonesian teacher talking about something incompressible all over again. For example. I was working as a volunteer for the RSPB (Royal Society Protection of Birds) at the time on a little island called Isle of Islay. I mainly looked after the cattle. One day I was working with a local guy, I don’t recall his name, when the cows started running towards me and the open gate I was standing next to. It was quite a nerve-wracking sight and I asked the guy, who was standing a few meters away, unsurely if I should close the gate. “Aye” he answered, which I took for “I”. You see, my teachers had definitely never used the word “Aye” while teaching, so I had no clue what it meant. So, I looked at him dumbfounded and repeated my question, “Should I close the gate?”. “Aye” he answered again this time more pressing. “I what?”, I said, and at the same time all the cows ran past us.
Anyway, in the end I got the right bus to ‘the rose garden’ where I watched a cultural show. It sucked big time. Getting back to Bangkok was much easier, as the words ‘Bangkok’ and ‘Kao San Road’ were understood by all.
Love and Peace,
Jonna
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