For those conversational in Khmer, do you even get to use it?

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parasitius
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For those conversational in Khmer, do you even get to use it?

Postby parasitius » Tue Aug 02, 2022 12:14 pm

I was very interested in learning Khmer, but now 6 weeks into my Cambodia visit I'm not 100% sure if it is worth the risk of investing the hours. Based on my experience here, unlike any other country I've ever visited, I'm not sure if most natives I'd encounter each day would even allow me to use it if I was conversational - that scares me.

I don't think beginners, etc., would be able to give me a good opinion on this question- because I've been there - I know that people sometimes respond positively and are amused at you learning 200 words etc. But that doesn't mean that when you're intermediate they'll welcome you trying to use the language exclusively. They may just laugh and "Oh wow you're so good!" in English and then cut you off etc. in some countries. That's why I want to ask fairly fluent people how they feel.

My usual approach in say Korea or France to start off as a beginner is to have interactions every day ordering my coffee etc. where they start off from the first second by talking to me in the local language and before you know it I can respond and understand almost all the possible responses. I don't believe that is at all possible in Cambodia, it seems like no one here would dare let a single word of Khmer slip out of their mouth. I've tried approaching people and addressing them in Spanish to see if they would relent and say in Khmer "hey I don't understand" but they're extremely unwilling and just keep practicing English even if I am a non-English speaker.

It's not something I've dealt with before so looking for an explanation of how this would progress if I actually was an intermediate and every store I walked in immediately pushed English on me.

NOTE TO OPS: Sorry if I was supposed to edit the original post and resubmit?? I don't know how to do that, I looked for any such option but didn't see it.
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Re: For those conversational in Khmer, do you even get to use it?

Postby leosmith » Wed Aug 03, 2022 2:59 am

parasitius wrote:My usual approach in say Korea or France to start off as a beginner is to have interactions every day ordering my coffee etc. where they start off from the first second by talking to me in the local language and before you know it I can respond and understand almost all the possible responses.
I don't know any Khmer, but I'm upper intermediate in Thai, which has some overlap culturally. No offense intended, but the issue here may not be Cambodia, but your approach. Benny Lewis popularized this a few years back, and it seems to have died off in popularity, probably because it is tricky to pull off. When you approach natives with your complete beginner's level Khmer, you are putting a lot of pressure on them to be patient, and essentially teach you. Not everyone likes to do that; Thais are somewhat impatient with that sort of thing too. A little small talk is fine, but beyond that...

The fact that you've had success with this in other countries is impressive, but personally, I would not feel comfortable asserting pressure on others at this stage. I'm already stressed out about just beginning to converse. That's why I always recommend spending a couple hundred hours with the language beforehand, and a big chunk of that as conversations with an italki tutor or language exchange partner. Know a few hundred words really well, some basic structure, good pronunciation and be past the really awkward beginning stage of conversation. I usually try to have at least 50 hrs of pure conversation before fully engaging with native strangers. I encounter little resistance after that.
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Re: For those conversational in Khmer, do you even get to use it?

Postby parasitius » Wed Aug 03, 2022 4:16 am

leosmith wrote:I don't know any Khmer, but I'm upper intermediate in Thai, which has some overlap culturally.


Yeah thanks for commenting I certainly agree to that - was trying not to be long winded - but Thailand is coincidentally the other country where I had the bad experience of just walking up to people and they spoke English seemingly based on my appearance. Feels really bad emotionally

leosmith wrote: you are putting a lot of pressure on them to be patient, and essentially teach you. Not everyone likes to do that;


So to clarify, I haven't said anything to them in Khmer. I'm approaching in a business where it is their job to speak first, and they talk immediately in a foreign language (English). This is not something I'm used to dealing with.

In Korea for example I didn't put any pressure on anyone to do anything, I simply replied to their questions if I understood and they judged me based on my response. The first few weeks they were more likely to reply back in English likely with the thought "Ok all this guy knows how to do is say hello". I'm saying that repeating this interaction 100 times eventually lead to me making it further and further along until the whole interaction happened without them expending effort/noticing that I was faking it.

I have a better example to describe this from my experience in Colombia. 95% of people there won't say anything in English no matter how bad you screw up or are unable to communicate. But there are that 5% that are obsessed with practicing English. When I first arrived you could say "oh they don't want to waste their time being your free teacher". But then after 1500 hours of study, these same 5% of people actually respond to me in exactly the same way as when I was 100 hours of study in. I don't think they'll treat me any different at 3000 hours. So I guess I'm kind of asking are Thai and Cambodian people all like this 5%? I don't know and I don't have a way to judge, because it requires at least upper intermediate Khmer. So I was hoping someone with that level can explain how the social dynamic is at that point. Do they fight you etc. or do they accept you as a "normal random person who just walked in". Hope that makes sense?
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Re: For those conversational in Khmer, do you even get to use it?

Postby Axon » Wed Aug 03, 2022 5:51 am

That's really interesting, and I wish we had more people active on this forum who could give their examples being conversational in uncommonly-learned languages like Khmer. We used to have one but he hasn't been active for years. I'd really like to hear more about your experiences speaking from day 1 in the target country, since that's an approach used by very few here.

I became conversational in Indonesian while living in Yogyakarta and had people basically use Indonesian with me every single interaction, even when they'd seen me speak English to the people I was with seconds before. I also knew that many people I talked to must have had a basic level of English since I would see them watching YouTube or listening to English music, and they were probably university educated on top of that. I considered this conundrum quite a bit - I do not look like a native Indonesian speaker and there were a reasonable number of tourists in Yogyakarta who spoke no Indonesian. I eventually chalked this up to body language - somehow, I figured, I appeared in the way I walked and approached the counter to be comfortable enough in the area that people guessed I spoke Indonesian. However, in Bali people often opened with English, and I'm guessing this was because of the massively higher ratio of tourists to locals that they saw each day there compared to in Yogyakarta.

I've been to Vietnam twice, both times using very little English (and not for lack of trying sometimes). I remember one little cafe I went to where I ordered in very shaky Vietnamese, sat down, and made a short call in English. Afterward the barista came over and asked in Vietnamese if I wanted the air conditioning turned up. She clearly knew I spoke English and I wasn't that good at Vietnamese, but must have fallen into the group of people who tried Vietnamese rather than attempt any English or staying silent. Similar things happened in other parts of Vietnam. I don't remember clearly considering this dynamic, but I definitely remember being spoken to in Vietnamese a lot.

The only other Southeast Asian country I've been to is Laos, and I was only there for eight days. I wrote a more detailed post in the Travel and Culture section of this forum, but although I met a lot of people who used English, I certainly went to several restaurants and cafes where I needed Lao (and more of it than I had) to communicate. I think I did run into the situation where I wanted to try out some simple Lao and got Englished, but more often I ran into the situation where I needed to accomplish something in Lao and it was made much harder by my lack of ability in Lao.

So I think you're dealing with a couple of possible factors:

1. You are frequenting places that happen to be staffed by people who know English in the first place and have experience speaking it to foreigners. Have you covered a wide geographical and socioeconomic range in the types of places you've been Englished?
2. You might be displaying something in your body language that shows that you're not entirely confident in the situation, making people want to accommodate you and not frighten you by speaking Khmer.
3. Since I've never been to Cambodia I can't tell for sure, but perhaps Khmer people really are more reticent to use Khmer with foreigners. Perhaps they feel it's intrinsically too difficult to learn or have never even heard of a foreigner learning it and it doesn't even occur to them that you would try.
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Re: For those conversational in Khmer, do you even get to use it?

Postby parasitius » Wed Aug 03, 2022 4:32 pm

Axon wrote:That's really interesting, and I wish we had more people active on this forum who could give their examples being conversational in uncommonly-learned languages like Khmer.


Super awesome share thanks for the info - it sounds like Vietnam would be heaven for me. The thing is, this topic is sometimes hard to discuss online I think because some people are oriented very different socially and seemingly for many it doesn't matter if the local in a given city starts the encounter in any given way linguistically, they can joke and redirect and control or something like that, or they can very easily make local friends who are monolinguals in spite of having a low level - and so they don't have to rely on daily interactions as much

I don't have social skills mastery of that type and at the age I'm at I have to come to terms with the unlikelihood I ever will -- this means very clearly I'm 100% dependent upon finding a very specific environment to learn languages. And I don't see why it should be a big deal since I've more or less been able to find it in China, Japan, France, Colombia, Korea, etc.

Axon wrote:1. You are frequenting places that happen to be staffed by people who know English in the first place and have experience speaking it to foreigners. Have you covered a wide geographical and socioeconomic range in the types of places you've been Englished?
2. You might be displaying something in your body language that shows that you're not entirely confident in the situation, making people want to accommodate you and not frighten you by speaking Khmer.
3. Since I've never been to Cambodia I can't tell for sure, but perhaps Khmer people really are more reticent to use Khmer with foreigners. Perhaps they feel it's intrinsically too difficult to learn or have never even heard of a foreigner learning it and it doesn't even occur to them that you would try.


1. This was the first thing I wondered. I've always noticed patterns. For example, in South Korea if I went to Japanese restaurants or anywhere staffed by elderly folks or with Korean only menus - no one had any interest whatsoever in English. So for the past 4 days I went out to a VERY small & poor town and was shocked that when I walked to a way out convenience store they still were as insistent & immediate with English as in the richest areas of Phnom Penh. Frustrated, I walked to the poorest part of that town with entirely dirt roads (1 hour walk) and found a restaurant where the staff looked at me weird when I walked in. First foreigner in ages I guess. The initial two people didn't speak any English, but they SPRINTED to bring over 2 staff members who were fluent. These were the only 2 people I managed to find in 50 days here who don't speak English, other than the building maids (who I wouldn't want to distract from their work, but if I know more I can get a sentence or two in).

2. YES. Totally possible. Won't know until I can find someone who is an intermediate+ to watch them in action. In a prior lifetime I moved to Shanghai to be an expat after years in small cities in China. When I arrived I was infuriated, I walked in convenience stores and they wouldn't speak to me but would make hand motions or mumble in English. They were reading my body language - I had just arrived in town and didn't know where I was. Within 2 weeks this never happened again - for the 3 years that followed. In fact, once an old couple approached me on the street to ask for directions. Unfortunately I couldn't help them as they were speaking in Shanghainese or some Wu dialect.

3. Yes I noticed the perception a people have about their language and the reality about it are 2 distinct things that aren't necessarily linked. So I don't know. The language itself has all the super easy attributes of Mandarin (words don't change form) and lacks the 2 hard ones (tones and characters).
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Re: For those conversational in Khmer, do you even get to use it?

Postby leosmith » Wed Aug 03, 2022 5:14 pm

parasitius wrote:So to clarify, I haven't said anything to them in Khmer. I'm approaching in a business where it is their job to speak first, and they talk immediately in a foreign language (English).

Ah, yeah - it makes sense in that case. Definitely in Thaliand/Laos/Cambodia (I was going to say anywhere in SEA, but Axon's post made me change my mind) the vast majority of whites speak little or no native language. In Korea, most whites speak some Korean, at least enough to function in stores, restaurants, etc. Same in Taiwan/China/Japan. Of course, in Colombia and France they will assume you speak the language.
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Re: For those conversational in Khmer, do you even get to use it?

Postby Axon » Wed Aug 03, 2022 6:36 pm

Fascinating. My old linguistics department at my university has a running project for researching the use and perception of English all around the world. Here's the one for Cambodia: http://worldenglishescambodia.weebly.co ... bodia.html

According to that research, English really is pretty popular for Cambodians to use, sometimes even among themselves. There also seems to be a culture of practicing English with coworkers and tourists, maybe more than in neighboring countries. That surprised me, and I think that could be part of your answer. Perhaps the bar you'll have to clear in Cambodia really is higher than in other countries.

Can you look for some places that are vacation destinations for Cambodians themselves? In Vietnam I went to a thriving beach town called Sầm Sơn and didn't see any other foreigners, even at the height of summer. I don't think I spoke any English there at all.

How would you rate your ability in Khmer after these six weeks? Are you able to greet people and order food without stopping to think too much?

In Hong Kong I had a conversation (in Mandarin) in a little shoe store where I asked what languages the employees preferred using with customers. They said they preferred Mandarin or Cantonese over English, but it wasn't a strong preference and they just wanted to get through the interaction as best they could. I think it makes sense for a service worker who's very confident in their own English to prefer to get through the transaction as smoothly as possible. Next time you get greeted with confident English, maybe you could ask the people working there how they learned such good English and for some advice about where to go to practice Khmer.
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Re: For those conversational in Khmer, do you even get to use it?

Postby alaart » Sat Aug 06, 2022 7:43 pm

Oh that's an interesting thread for me, as I have wondered the same.

So in Japan usually the other foreigners complained that they always get spoken to in English, while I always got spoken to in Japanese, almost nobody ever opened a conversation in English with me, neither in big cities nor in the counryside. I too assumed that it must be body language, or that people were very afraid to speak English to me, and maybe my colleagues looked a bit more friendly or something. I did encounter a couple people that wanted to practice English, for the sake of practicing English. And I just politely told them that I came to their country to speak their language and I won't use English while I'm here. After a couple sentences of me exclusively replying in Japanese they usually gave up.

I have helped specific people by talking to them in German or English to help them, but mostly not because they forced their selves on me, they were language learners like me and genuinely wanted help, so why not - great way to make friends if they don't want to just "use" you.

In Taiwan people also spoke no English to me, and I had trouble in Gaoxiong / Kaohsiung because some people spoke Taiwanese to me (or maybe Mandarin with very heavy accent), and while I could hold an ok conversation in Mandarin (at least at the time), I don't know Taiwanese at all. I took a flight from the small airport in Kaohsiung, and I was surprised that they spoke to me there in Mandarin too and told me that my flight was delayed and I have to wait. I mean, if I didn't know any Mandarin, I would be pretty confused, right?
Also in Taipei, everybody even my air-bnb guy who was supposed to speak English spoke only Mandarin.

In Korea, I spoke no Korean at that time, always nobody spoke English to me. I walked around Seoul for days and it was almost impossible. I wanted to speak English - impossible because I was overwhelmed. I remember 2 school girls talked to me in English, one Monk he said: "I Monk" - that was all.
Some people talked Korean to me, a lot of elderly man. In restaurants or stores also. They wanted to explain to me that I can take pictures, or buy stuff or show me something in Seoul. I don't know, I was very confused all the time.

In Europe, for example in the Netherlands, Belgium, France - people don't see that I'm a foreigners, so they usually just address me in their native language.


Yeah and also cool that you are doing this at all. It's a bit inspiring, kind of wish I had the confidence to do that too. I think I'd have the confidence to approach people and talk to them, but at least right now I would worry a lot financially.
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Re: For those conversational in Khmer, do you even get to use it?

Postby Sae » Mon Aug 08, 2022 1:17 pm

I honestly don't know enough about Khmer or Cambodia itself. Instead I've been learning Vietnamese, so the other side of the border and I know the two languages aren't mutually intelligible.

I guess what could be relatable is in Germany, when I try to speak in German but people speak to me in English, probably because my German isn't very good. That could be either because they are trying to be nice and not letting me struggle, or it could be because as leosmith suggested is that it's extra work for them. And it could be a bit of both and conversational language is about the path of least resistance. But I still get people who talk back to me in German at least.

However, I don't know the Cambodian cultural attitude when it comes to speaking the Khmer language as a learner, but my general view & understanding is that most people appreciate when you make the effort and may be willing to accommodate a certain amount of errors/mistakes. But I guess one argument is they're not your language tutors and maybe they don't want to work harder to communicate when they know English and it's just easier.

But maybe the challenge then for you is the same as it is for somebody who's learning Khmer who isn't in Cambodia, I guess like how I am in the UK learning Vietnamese and have never met a Vietnamese person face-to-face. Yet I am at the stage where I am practicing conversation and from a personal stand point, I want to get to a good conversational level before I am in Vietnam speaking to locals. I am achieving it because I am working with a tutor who is Vietnamese who lives in Vietnam. And I know once I've reached a certain level of confidence with him, I'm going to use apps like HelloTalk and Tandem, which hook you up to native speakers to practice with, which can include meeting face-to-face. I don't know what those apps are like in Cambodia or for supporting Khmer, but it may be an option. I guess the alternative would be to have a Cambodian friend or associate who is willing to help. Heck that Cambodian person might be able to offer you guidance on how you might better approach it. I don't think many people in the world would be offended being asked how you can better understand their culture & language.
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Re: For those conversational in Khmer, do you even get to use it?

Postby Axon » Wed Sep 28, 2022 6:00 am

parasitius wrote: ... 6 weeks into my Cambodia visit ...


It's been about ten weeks in total now, how is it going?
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