[2] In 1960, Khuon Sokhampu passed the entrance exam for the Phnom Penh Pedagogical Institute and completed two years of teaching at the Lycée Descartes.
At that time during the Sangkum era, Prince Sihanouk was trying to maintain a neutral policy of non-alignment in the context of the Cold War.
While working in East Berlin, German government studied general linguistics at Humboldt University until obtaining his doctorate on the phonetics of the Khmer language, before returning home to Cambodia in late 1969.
However, as Cambodian flipped from neutrality to American ally under the Khmer Republic, his diplomas from a socialist country were not fully recognized.
Khuon Sokhampu was a close student of Chuon Nath, and his used the weekly radio talk shows of the latter as the raw material for his study of the phonetics of the Phnom Penh dialect.