Mother tongue.

I've begun to notice that my ability to read or write Thai is slowly deteriorating. It may be because I use written Thai so little in my everyday life. It's pretty strange to think that I might be losing my own language. I can speak it just fine but if I read I feel like I have to try a bit harder to understand than I would if it were in English.

Thai was my first language but when I was 6-7 I moved to NY for 4 years and subsequently forgot almost everything. I had to re-learn it when we moved back, I was about 11 then. It's a really hard language to learn because it's a tonal language and I had a very hard time training my ears to here the tones again. And don't even get me started on the god damn spelling! We have letters that are actually silent. Then why the hell do we put them there!? Because it's always been there. (And that says a whole lot about how the education system treats outdated things here.)

Yeesh. Just thinking about how hard it was to learn it the second time round is going to scare me enough to brush up on my skills.