Just another small contribution to the language-learning blogosphere, ខ្មែរស្រួលរៀន is focused on a language that does not get a lot of attention – Khmer. This is not the first blog about Khmer (see manur.org’s រៀនខ្មែរ and Typing to Learn Khmer), but as the others are not very active at the moment I’ve taken it upon myself to start this blog to document my own progress in the language, and provide some useful material for others who wish to learn but don’t know where to start.
(In fact, I’ve been procrastinating about posting here for a while, but decided that with the coming of the Cambodian New Year, it was as good a time as any to start something new)
To start off this blog, a short review of online and offline resources:
Khmer Unicode:
Everything you’ll need to read and write Khmer on your computer can be found here: KhmerOS
Khmer Unicode is still rather new and is not supported by Windows or any other operating system AFAIK (edit: Khmer is apparenly supported by Windows Vista), so you’ll need to do a little fiddling with your computer to make things display correctly.
Websites:
Cambodia SEAsite The most complete site on the net – special font required to view the Khmer and IPA phonetics, but otherwise a very useful site with lessons covering the writing system, conversation, elementary reading passages, all with sound files.
Authentic Khmer More of an online phrasebook, with sound files
learn khmer language Another phrasebook
khmerlanguage.com Yet another phrasebook (but no audio and non-unicode font)
À la recherche d’une grammaire khmère Very disorganized but potentially useful site about Khmer grammar, from an expat living in Montreal (in French/English)
I Learn Khmer flash site teaching khmer (“ coming soon” for the past two years or so…)
ខ្មែរក្រៃលែង (Extreme Khmer) Videos about Khmer and Cambodia from a Khmer teacher. The author’s textbooks are also for sale on-site.
Books:
-Cambodian for Beginners by R.K. Gilbert, S. Hang
-Colloquial Cambodian by David Smyth
These two are probably the only widely-available beginner-level books. Each have their good points and drawbacks – Colloquial Cambodian is more tailored to the tourist, with much of the dialogue dealing with typical tourist situations, while Cambodian for beginners has a more general focus (long word lists of body parts, time expressions, etc.) Both have been criticized as being too formal and not colloquial enough (though, as it happens, Colloquial is the more colloquial of the two) but both are good enough as a not-so-serious introduction, and both come with audio CDs.
-Judith Jacob’s Introduction to Cambodian, while a bit dated, is also a good beginner’s text.
For those who want a more serious, in-depth introduction to Cambodian, the books by Franklin E. Huffman and Im Proum are the way to go:
-Modern Spoken Cambodian (the yellow book)
-Cambodian System of Writing and Beginning Reader (green)
-Intermediate Cambodian Reader (red)
-Cambodian Literary Reader and Glossary (blue)
All of the above have been public domain since the late 70s, but apart from the green book and the audio for the yellow book they are not available online and are rather expensive and hard to find.
FSI’s Cambodian Basic Course can be downloaded in its entirety here.
Also check out the grammatical sketch at the bottom of the page.
Dictionaries:
English>Khmer
Khmer<>English (with phonetics, also includes the classic monolingual 1966 Chuon Nath dictionary)
Offline dictionaries will be discussed in a future post.
