My khmer is improving, but fluency is a long ways off. I can usually be understood when communicating simple ideas about prices, directions, etc. but I have a lot of trouble distinguishing sounds when people are talking to me.
Typical conversation:
me: sus 'dai (hello)
shopkeeper: sus 'dai (hello)
me: Chung ban pom. T'lai pon man? (I want apples. How much do they cost?)
shopkeeper: blah blah blah blah blah blah
me: uhhh...
shopkeeper: tells me the price in English, and I walk away humbled.
My vocabulary is expanding at least, and I find the only way I can remember words is by making up illogical associations for them. The following may not be of interest to any other living human, but the internet being full of such echo chambers, what the hell. Here are a few of the dozens of mnemonic tricks I have for new words:
ma noa (pineapple)--imagining the wife of Noah with nothing to eat but pineapple on the arc
bon lai (vegetable)--imagining giving a dog a fake bone carved out of a parsnip=telling a bone lie
mea (golden)--a childhood friend was very close to a girl named Mia. To him, she was golden.
re'ap ka (married)--first word sounds kind of like reap. Ka was one of the Egyptian souls. When you are married you know the soul of another person, therefore you reap ka.
saa mo'an (chicken meat)--I imagine the chicken moaning as it's being slaughtered
kro-dah (paper)--first sound=crow, second sound=da, to give in Spanish. I picture a very clever crow delivering a message written on scrap of paper to a wizard.
kom-but (knife)--I'm calm, but I have a knife, so don't mess with me.
pang pa (tomato)--During the great depression Pa was so poor he had nothing to eat but tomatoes, which gave him terrible stomach pangs.
t'ror kol (surname)--First sound is kind of like the norse god Thor, second sound is like col, the Spanish word for cabbage. No idea why these images should help me remember surname, but somehow it works.
The only drawback of the system is that I tend to pronounce the English word that the sound reminds me of, which is ultimately different.
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