BKK Log
By: Kate Ahn (CAS ’28)
GRIP: PR and Marketing in Bangkok, Thailand
Thai is not a very easy language to pick up as a foreigner. In all my time in Bangkok, I collected at most a handful basic phrases, each used to varying degrees of success. Hello. Yes (and no). Could I get this? Please go slowly (this was useful when going on motorbike taxis). Sorry. Elephant. Hungry. Thank you. The characters are unique, the language itself is tonal: questions and exclamations are sung as much as they are spoken. Try as I did, I never got to teach myself to understand conversation and responded to most questions with an apologetic smile.
Global experiences are often touted as important for its opportunities in language immersion. Despite my limited success in learning Thai, I do agree that one of the most important things I learnt this summer was my own kind of language immersion: one that expands beyond just the language of the host country.
In my internship at the Thaiger, I learned how to identify and use words unique to video production and marketing. Producing the daily morning live show every morning, I learned words like OBS, delay, keyframe: OBS is a kind of livestream production software. Delay refers to the programmed staggering of footage to edit out potential mistakes in real time. Keyframes serve as a point of reference when animating graphics. Shadowing the team on client shoot projects, I picked up words like honeycomb and gimbal: a honeycomb helps diffuse artificial lighting. A gimbal stabilizes a camera in movement during shooting projects. In its own way, working for the Thaiger introduced me to a microcosm of professional vocabulary that I otherwise wouldn’t have access to.
The same went for my experiences outside of the office. I could associate words I already knew with new sensations: how else could I have learnt how deeply sweet and floral mango could actually taste, or how fragrant pandan is when mixed with coconut? Or how jazz actually sounds when you hear it in a cramped bar deep inside the heart of Bangkok? Or how humidity feels different when it beads against your forehead in an old wooden train, rattling down the west rib of Thailand?
Looking now at the miscellaneous collection of words, sensations and experiences I’ve been able to learn firsthand this past summer, I can’t help but agree that one of the most important strengths of global experiences lies in language acquisition; but not necessarily the kind we’re familiar with. My GRIP experience has allowed me to enrich the language of my identity–as a student, a creative, a person–in ways that I otherwise would never have gotten the chance to.
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