Thai. Written it is an extremely beautiful language that looks caught somewhere between Cambodian and Tolkien's elvish. When I see students or teachers writing in Thai I always stop to watch, fascinated by the how completely foreign the script being produced looks.
Spoken it can at times flow together as well as the written word and at others sound jarring and quite whiny, a bit Fran Drescher like.
In either form I understand close to nothing. Hello, goodbye, a few more simple phrases but really nothing, which reduces me at times to getting help from 12 year olds to order simple meals but also makes small feats seem like huge accomplishments. Finally finding the right bus seems like cause for a raucous party and getting home from a new part of the city might as well have been summiting Mt. Everest. All be it a much hotter and incredibly fucking humid Everest.
The great David Foster Wallace sums up the feeling perfectly as he did most anything he went about describing. The title genius has become a fairly watered down term in recent years, haphazardly thrown around and used to describe everyone from paunchy, egomaniacal football coaches to mediocre musicians with a frightening regularity but Wallace was truly more than deserving of being called one. Gone way too soon.
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