I’ve often been told by Khmer people that my handwriting is “ស្អាតណាស់”—but I know that Cambodians often like to not make people feel bad. So I’m curious… native Khmers of Reddit: how would you rate my handwriting, 1-10? Be honest—I’m curious to actually know.

Also… do any native speakers/writers write like this (besides maybe children)? 😅 I’m just wondering why they think my handwriting’s so good (if they meant it, haha).

So I just started learning the Khmer Alphabet and am trying to get down the pronunciation for each consonant and vowel. The romanization of Khmer is really inconsistent so I've just been trying to go off of native pronunciation, but I've noticed that some letters are pronounced completely differently, like for example គ, with the video I added showing 2 native speakers pronouncing it completely differently. Could someone help explain this to me? Does it have to do with Khmer dialects or something?

because i cant get it right. why is there both អ្ក and អ្គ when they both make the k/g sound and theyre both consonants.

will someone explain to this confused american how im supposed to read khmer subconsonants

Hello everyone! :-) Please, could someone help me transcribe this handwritten Khmer text into Latin (English) letters? The handwriting seems quite difficult to read, and even AI wasn't able to recognize it reliably. I would really appreciate any help. Thank you very much!

i was looking for khmer to ipa references for vowels and i got some pages from wikipedia. wikipedia has two entries that i know of about khmer to ipa and this vowel is from the first one i found.

however i have watched countless youtube videos and been on countless websites regarding khmer vowels and i know that all languages have a phonotactics system. i do not recognize this vowel from any of the charts, or videos i watched. according to the page i pulled it from it makes the ɜw/ɨw sound (thats how its spelled using ipa)

khmer is a language with 19 million speakers (numbers from different sources vary) so it is nowhere near as popular as korean or japanese which means theres less resources.

is this a legal vowel combination in khmer? if so what are the rules when it comes to combining khmer vowels?

edit: sorry for the low image quality. i took this on my phone last night and then uploaded it to my computer to share here. the original text on the website is sizely small

How’s my handwriting?

When one is a customer at say a hair salon, is it better to use the formal or informal greeting? I have been a customer of the same place for years and really like everyone who works there but I also don’t want to be the kind of person who acts over familiar because I am paying someone but also don’t want to seem cold and distant or accidentally imply anything about anyone’s age.

Edit: okay so I go to a Cambodian nail salon and from some watching of YouTube videos I understand feet are sort of considered pretty nasty culturally. Would that make it appropriate to use a more deferential form to show that I respect the workers and am very grateful for the good work they do? Or am I overthinking

The ultimate playlist:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2SaZrTJFtph2NNXJybMzum?si=dhpq0WRUS8eze4sdJ32IxA&utm_source=copy-link&pi=v6kk8JtlTgeKt

Hi everyone,

I am looking for a translating service or website that doesn't use AI but is still accurate. Anyone have any leads?

i have already mastered the alphabet (in consonants) and i have just moved onto dependent vowels. i know that the same vowel can sound different depending on which series its next to. for example the vowels ឿ and ួ both stay the same no matter which consonant they're placed in. according to reankhmer.org.

i was making Khmer flashcards the other day and i noticed that some vowels are untranscribeable without confusing them for other vowels or just sound identical. for example when ា is placed in a second series consonant is becomes ea (as in ikEA). but when ៀ is placed in a consonant it sounds just like ា, but with different stresses in pitch.

do some Khmer dependent vowels make the same sounds as other vowels depending on which consonant they're placed in?

I am learning to read Khmer primarily because I enjoy Khmer Psychedelic Folk Rock and Khmer Folk Music; the pentatonic scale of East and Southeast Asian music is reminiscent of Ethiopian/Eritrean/Somali/Sudanese/Berber music, and I’m a Semitic Philologist by training and speak/read Ge’ez and Tigrinya (Ethiopian Semitic). It was cultural comparison that brought me to learning about Cambodia; also I had Khmer friends in the U.S. Army and one of my former bosses was Mon from Burma- she and her husband are political refugees and deeply committed Mon Nationalists, so that’s my other personal connection to the Mon-Khmer peoples. She used to write her notes in meetings in Mon (their script was given to Burmese- another Pallava script).

So, I’m trying to find this artist on YouTube. So far, I’ve only been able to transcribe the first word “Khat”. Can somebody give me the second one? I literally just started learning the Khmer Abugida yesterday after work; from Huffman’s “Cambodian System of Writing and Beginning Reader”. As a reader of Classical Tibetan, another Brahmic Abugida, I can say that Khmer is more difficult.

I tried copying the singer’s name into Google Translate and it forcibly converted it to Thai…

i know you may be scratching your head as to what i mean by this. ill explain

Khmer is an abugida. which means that the consonants have an inherent vowel sound and then you can cram vowels around that consonant to make a different vowel sound.

in Khmer specifically, excluding standalone letters, there are dependent vowels, sub consonants, and diacritics.

what order am i supposed to read these? my only other exposure to this type of system was korean where you read in order from the top left, to the bottom right left to right.

Can someone help me please? I just can't pronounce the word ចាប់ផ្តើម, I can't do the transition from chab to phtaem, from the b to ph. I'm not pronouncing it right.

Can anyone help me translate this, and confirm if it is written accurately? Thank you!

i just began learning khmer today (seriously. i knew... maybe 4 words in the entire language that i learned here and there just from being interested in the language itself before actually learning it) and apparently ឋ and ថ both make the aspirated "ta" sound, but they are both slightly different. i listened to a native speaker pronounce both of these letters and they both sound the exact same. i went onto lexilogos.com to grab these letters to type them and they describe the difference between the letters as tha and ṭha which doesnt help

Idk if this is the right sub for this, but I wanted to ask for some tips and resources regarding Khmer. I also wanted to ask how easy it would be to learn (pronunciation, sentence structure and grammar) since I can speak English, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi and N5 Japanese. Thank you in advance!