Subscribe Feed (RSS)1 = 7
May 14th, 2007 by eyal | Filed under Asia. |
Print This Post
How can 1 equal 7? When you learn Thai it does. Those who read with some regularity may remember I’m picking up Thai using the Pimsleur tapes. They’re really good. Anyways, I got to the lesson that deals with telling the time of the day. Sounds like a normal basic step in learning a language, you know:
Q: “What time is it?”
A: “It’s 7pm”.
Well in Thai that’s not so straight forward. Apparently in Thai, 7pm is actually 1 at night! The Thai divide the day into 4 parts and so you get 1 afternoon, 2 afternoon, 3 afternoon etc. and 1 night, 2 night, 3 night etc. One thing that makes it a bit easier is that the numbers are very similar to Chinese (actually closer to Cantonese) so it’s not too difficult for me to remember them but remembering that 5 night is actually 11pm, well that’s crazy. But the extra brownie points I get are worth it ;-)
Crazy? Try Thai for “far” and “near”. That’s crazy.
Haha.. just checked it out. Crazy indeed. Oddly enough, that’s the kind of crazy I’m more used to, it’s the same situation in Mandarin with “buy” and “sell”! Imagine the implcations of getting it wrong when dealing with trading lol
Maybe it can explain the chinese stocks bubble? ;-) Ooops.