Over the many years I\u2019ve studied Thai I have noticed how my projected personality has changed as I improved in the language. When anyone first learns any language, you start with just the basics, basic phrases, basic concepts, basic cultural do\u2019s and don\u2019ts, etc. Given your extremely small vocabulary, it\u2019s not about conveying a concept exactly how you want, but about struggling to convey any concept at all. You have little knowledge as to how words fit within the spectrum of extremely rude to extremely polite. And being someone from another culture, \u2018they\u2019 don\u2019t understand you and you don\u2019t really understand them – so you\u2019re unable to fine tune your speech to be best understood.<\/p>\n
In other words, the personality you project is incongruent with your actual personality.<\/p>\n
In my personal experiences, I know many Thais who come off as very polite and friendly and simple when speaking their [somewhat broken] English. But when they speak Thai, it\u2019s like they are entirely different people! It\u2019s not quite right to say that they are more rude when they speak Thai, but like they are more \u2018normal\u2019 and \u2018human\u2019. They are much more intelligent and complicated individuals, and really just like \u2018us\u2019 in every way.<\/p>\n
And so I got to thinking . . . what if we are the same as they are when speaking our [mostly broken] Thai to them? After all, many of us curse when speaking English, yet we say \u2018krap\u2019 in nearly every sentence when speaking Thai.<\/p>\n
Hanging out with Thai\u2019s for a long time will have an effect on your personality. You\u2019ll pick up mannerisms, learn their jokes, learn new ways of thinking that isn\u2019t western per se, etc. You\u2019ll even adopt the \u2018mai bpen rai\u2019 culture, and actively avoid saying things that cause others to lose face. And when you return back to your western friends you can\u2019t just shake all of that off.<\/p>\n
For the first few years you\u2019ll probably have a sort of dual personality depending on the language you are speaking at the time. But, at least in my case, I noticed these two dual personalities slowly merge together as my Thai got better.<\/p>\n
If anyone has some comments on their own related experiences please feel free to comment on them below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over the many years I\u2019ve studied Thai I have noticed how my projected personality has changed as I improved in the language.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[10208,10341],"tags":[8,7511,10177],"class_list":["post-1288","post","type-post","status-publish","hentry","category-beginner","category-intermediate","tag-language","tag-personality","tag-thai"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1288"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1291,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288\/revisions\/1291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/thai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}