"I speak Myanmar language."

Welcome to my blog. I teach English in Myanmar and I often hear lots of my Burmese students make similar mistakes in class. Some of these mistakes happen because of differences between how you say things in Burmese and how you say the same things in English. Each blog post will look at one of these common mistakes, try to explain why they happen, and what the correct English is. I'm going to look at different levels (Beginner-Intermediate), so sometimes the English will be easy to understand, and sometimes it will be more difficult.

Countries, Nationalities and Languages

For my first lesson I'm going to talk about a very basic vocabulary idea. In Burmese this is really easy:

But we can't translate these ideas directly to English without making a mistake.

Instead we say this:

So these 3 ideas are connected:

Thailand is the name of the country. Countries are nouns. 

Thai is the word for her nationality. Nationalities are adjectives. 

Thai is also the name for her language. Languages are nouns. 

Try and complete this one.

Here's the answer:

Sometimes the nationality and the language are different.

Here's a table of countries, nationalities and languages. Can you fill in the gaps?

Country	Nationality	Language
Thailand	Thai	Thai
Turkey	Turkish	___________
___________	French	French
Bangladesh	___________	Bengali/Bangla
Spain	___________	Spanish
Russia	___________	___________
Canada	___________	English/French
Laos	Lao/Laotian	___________
Cambodia	___________	___________

Here's the answers:

Country	Nationality	Language
Thailand	Thai	Thai
Turkey	Turkish	Turkish
France	French	French
Bangladesh	Bangladeshi	Bengali/Bangla
Spain	Spanish	Spanish
Russia	Russian	Russian
Canada	Canadian	English/French
Laos	Lao/Laotian	Lao
Cambodia	Cambodian	Khmer

As you can see, nationalities and languages are often the same, but not always.

We can use the nationality adjective to talk about other things that come from one country. Here's an example:

Which translates to this:

But what about Myanmar?

Myanmar is a little more complicated, because the name of the country changed in 1989. This means that we also needed a new nationality adjective and language noun. We can use "Myanmar" for all of these words. Sometimes people use "Myanma" for the nationality or language.

The problem is, a lot of people in other countries don't know the new name for the country or understand the new words. So you can also use the old name for the nationality and language, which is "Burmese." I use "Burmese" in this blog.

Country	Nationality	Language
Myanmar	Myanmar/Myanma/Burmese	Myanmar/Myanma/Burmese

Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions or suggestions for other English points to explain, please leave them in the comment section.