One of the difficulties I have encountered since the start of my journeys in South East Asia has, as one would expect, been the languages. These difficulties come from a few causes, the majority of which, I believe, are common to most Westerners (or people from European backgrounds).

1 – Different Root Language

The majority of European languages have common roots, either in Latin, or in another European language. Also, due to their proximity to each other, and the long history of trade and interactions between countries, some words have spread from one region to another, being adapted/bastardised/changed over time as they spread meaning that, for the most part, if you speak one European language, you can understand, to varying degrees, most other European languages.

Due to the separation between Europe and Asia which existed for so long before The Silk Road was established, Asian languages seem to have evolved in a parallel fashion. Alot of Japanese written characters are derived from Chinese characters. And, as in European languages, some words are similar between alot of SE Asian languages (“Sawadee” in Thai, “Sabadii” in Lao, etc.)

The difficulty is that Europeans are constantly (and subconsciously) searching most speech around them for these European threads, when they simply don’t exist in Asian languages. And, I would dare say, Asians, when in a European-speaking country, are searching for the Asian threads in what they hear.

2 – A New Concept: Tones

Whilst, in European languages, tones are used to express emotion or an underlying meaning, in alot of Asian languages, tones are an integral part of the language. In Mandarin Chinese, for instance, the word “ma” has different meanings based on the tone which it is spoken with – it can mean “yes or no?”, or “mother”, or “hemp”/”sesame”/”numb”, or “horse”/”agate”/”morphine”, or “to scold”/”headboard”/”mark”. (Where I have put words with a slash, the same tone can have multiple meanings – confusing, hey?)

Very different to European languages, isn’t it?

The hardest part of the tones is that, to an untrained Westerner’s ear, they all sound the same – but that is because we cannot see the forest for the trees, so to speak. We are so intently focusing on the words (looking for the meaning there), as would be the case with a European language, we don’t pay attention to the tones (which, for European languages is additional, emotional, information).

Another difficulty faced with the tones is that, Western sensibilities always teach us that mimicry is most often used as a form of ridicule or offence. So when we are learning a new Asian language, either formally or informally, we will sometimes shy away from mimicking the speakers exact inflections and tones for fear of offending them.

Well, at least these are my observations over the past few months. I may be well off base. I guess I will have to see how Myanmar, Malay and Hindi compare to Thai, Lao, Khmer, Vietnamese, Cantonese and Mandarin before I really know…