Expressing one's experience in some selected languages

Expressing one's Experience in Some Selected  Languages

                                                      By Janpha Thadphoothon

Are you a polyglot? You may say YES or NO. In many aspects, we are heading toward the world of multiculturalism. It's the thing of the 21st century that we speak and learn more than 2 languages.


I would like to introduce ways to express one's experience in Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Myanmar, Khmer, and Thai.

Express your experience can be done in various ways using different syntactic structures. One of the most common is to say what one used to do. For example, I used to live in Canberra, Australia.

- I used to own a Toyota Corona.
- My father used to own a pick up truck.
- My English teacher used to ask me to apply for a scholarship.
- We used to go shopping after work.

Another common structure, especially in English, is to use one form of present perfect tense. For example, I have been to Hanoi.

- Have you ever eaten Sushi?
- Have you been to the US?
- Have you talked to her?

The best way to address this issue is to begin with verbs. To signify 'experience', we can either put the marker before or after the main verb,

In English we can put 'used to before the main verb such as "I used to live in Hanoi."

VERBS help us to express our experience. Let's start with verbs. One of the simplest is: to eat.

In Myanmar to eat is: စား /Saa/
In Thai to eat is: กิน or /kin/
In Japanese to eat is: 食べる /taberu/
In Khmer, one would say 'Yum' or Hope' --- to eat
In Vietnamese, it's ăn
In Chinese, it's 吃 or Chī

===== Myanmar ======

In Myanmar, if you want to say "I used to eat Mohinga, you will need to say:

ကျွန်တော် မုန့်ဟင်းခါး စားဖူး တယ်။

If you wish to asked, "Have you ever eaten chocolate?" In Myanmar, you should say:

ချောကလက် စားဖူးသလား? /Chocolate saapoo tha laa/


In summary, the word 'poo' signifies one's experience. You simply put it right after the main verb.

========= Japanese ========

In Japanese, you use : verb + ta goto

For example:

アメリカに行ったことありますか？
Have you ever been to the USA?

あなたは今まで  さくらの花  を 見たことがありますか？ Have you ever seen cherry blossoms?

============= Chinese ==============

Like Myanmar, you add another after the main verb. For example:


Have you ever been to China? - 你 去过 中国 吗？

Have you ever eaten Chinese food ?  -- 你吃过中国菜吗？

======== Khmer (Cambodian) =========

The structure is similar to Thai, Lao, and Vietnamese. The experience marker appears before the main verb.

ធ្លាប់  /Thleap/ simply means "used to + V1"

I used to go to Bangkok. ខ្ញុំ ធ្លាប់ ទៅ ក្រុង បាងកក។

Have you ever been to Angkor Wat?
តើអ្នក ធ្លាប់ ទៅប្រាសាទអង្គរវត្ត?


======= Vietnamese ========

Key word is the word "từng " which means 'used to + V1

Used to eat

Have you been to VietNam before?
Anh đã từng đến Việt Nam chưa?

Bạn đã từng đến vịnh Hạ Long không?

Have you ever been to Halong Bay?

 Anh đã từng ăn thịt ếch bao giờ chưa? -- He has never eaten frog before?