After two months, my Khmer is coming along like a dry-season slum fire. I now have a tutor named Sokha, a former journalist, who comes to my apartment on Sundays to guide me through a fairly solid textbook course. Speaking Khmer is not too difficult in comparative terms — I’ve met a lot of people who have achieved semi-fluency quite quickly — but like most things here, it is strewn with frustrating and unnecessary obstacles.

A particular difficulty is that Khmer lacks a standardized transliteration system (such as pinyin for Chinese or Vietnam’s quoc ngu system) and every textbook has its own system of translating the language into Roman script. The word bram (‘five’), for instance, is listed in my three textbooks as pram, brum and bprah!m, making memorisation and accurate pronunciation a real pain. (The French did apparently try to replace the Khmer script with a Roman system in the 1940s, but abandoned the attempt after violent street-riots in the capital. This old French system is still used for the place-names now appearing on most maps, such as ‘Siem Reap’, but bears little similarity to how the words actually sound when spoken, especially for English speakers).

I’m also trying to teach myself to read Khmer script, which is a whole new world of difficulty. Khmer has two separate sets (or ‘registers’) of consonants, each of which determines the pronunciation of the vowels with which they are paired. To read Khmer, you essentially need to learn two separate alphabets, which are then employed arbitrarily, first one then the other, according to the vague patterns handed down from Sanskrit. Then there are the diacritics. And the consonant clusters. The mind reels.

Khmer is nominally part of the Mon-Khmer ethno-linguistic family, closely related to a raft of minority tongues scattered from central Vietnam to India’s eastern hill-states (and also to Vietnamese, if one rogue branch of linguistics is to be believed). But Southeast Asia’s colourful history of invasion and counter-invasion, leavened by sprinklings of cultural chauvinism, has seeded Khmer with vocabulary from across East Asia. Although linguistically distinct, Thai-Lao and Khmer share a large body of Sanskrit-derived terms. I’ve already noticed clear similarities in some common political terms: the Khmer procheachon (‘the people’), for instance, corresponds to pasason in Lao, while proteh (‘nation, country’) finds parallels in prathet and pathet in Thai and Lao respectively. The odd Vietnamese loan-word has also slipped through the net of cultural antagonism, so that Khmer has boon (‘four’), deriving from the Vietnamese bon, and soay (‘mango’), derived from xoài.

After interviewing some employees from the Sinohydro Hydroelectric Co. Ltd. (中国水利水电建设集团公司), the Chinese state firm that is building the Three Gorges Dam and the controversial Kamchay hydroelectric project in Kampot province, I’ve also decided to seek out a Mandarin tutor. Due to the profusion of Chinese restaurants in Phnom Penh, my Chinese is hovering just above survival level, and the Chinese community here is large enough to justify weekly lessons. Aside from English, Chinese is also the commonest language taken by Khmer students, and with the Chinese government leading a massive push into Cambodia (culminating in a US$600 million aid package in 2005), expanding my small palette of 普通话 might prove useful in the short-term as well as the long.