Women Learning Thai… and some men too ;-)

A trusted native speaker is essential…. You may have noticed by now that learning Thai takes real effort and discipline. No two ways about it. Expect to put in long hours tweaking your pronunciation, expanding your vocabulary, solidifying your grasp on the grammar. One of the best — and most necessary — language resources you [...]

Bumper stickers are us… Bumper stickers in Thailand make for an interesting language lesson and a good way to pass time when you’re caught in traffic. Apart from the typical เมา ไม่ ขับ (mao mai khap) “Don’t Drink and Drive” and เรา รัก ในห ลวง (rao rak nai luang) “We Love the King” stickers, one [...]

A farang by any other name… Any white foreigner who spends even a few days in Thailand will learn at least one Thai word: ฝรั่ง (farang). It’s being used by Thais to refer to them – whether they’re aware of it or not. Farang is one of the first words that will stand out from [...]

Taking the long way home… One skill that will always come in handy when learning a second language is being able to say what you want without knowing how to say it. Yes, you read correctly. It’s the fine art of circumlocution: literally, talking a circle around what you mean. And it’s something you’ll find [...]

Titles are here there and everywhere… What’s in a title? That which we call a Ms. by any other title would smell as sweet. Apologies to Shakespeare. I read an interesting Thai law the other day on the topic of titles for women. As you may know, the basic titles for women in Thailand are [...]

Two of the most common words of all… In any language, a tiny handful of words make up a disproportionate percentage of the sentences you write or speak. It’s a mathematical law, actually. In the British National Corpus, a collection of 100 million words of written and spoken English, more than 6% is taken up [...]

Let’s get down to it… English and Thai take rather different approaches to personal pronouns. In English, there’s a small set of words we use in most situations: I, we, you, he, she, they, it. In the object case there are a few that change: me, us, him, her. Unless you’re reading Shakespeare or the [...]

Language thinking gets you everywhere… When speaking a new language, it’s tough to kick the impulse to translate what you want to say from your mother tongue. When you’re first learning, you’re thinking of each sentence in English first. This can result in some pretty tortured Thai. As you continue to improve, your speech patterns [...]

The Thais have nicknames too… This week I’ll give you a break from my normal spiel on the linguistic nuts and bolts of the Thai language and do something a bit lighter. If you’ve spent any amount of time in Thailand, you’re bound to have noticed that Thais have very colorful nicknames. Common Thai nicknames [...]

Every, many and more… Let’s look at the difference between ทั้ง (tháng) and ทุก (thúk), remembering that “th” is pronounced as a “T” while breathing out. In rough translation, ทั้ง corresponds to “all” and ทุก to “every”. You use ทั้ง for all of one thing and ทุก for all of many things. As with typical [...]

Long or short really does matter… When it comes to Thai vowels, length really does matter. I remember in grade school that the teacher taught about “long” and “short” vowels in English, where the i in “bite” is long, but the i in “bit” is short. Or something like that. This terminology has been around [...]

A loan by any other name… Anyone who has spent time in Thailand knows that Thai, like many other languages, has a generous helping of English words mixed into the vernacular. English also figures significantly in the technical and academic vocabulary of Thai, where frequently an imported version of an English term catches on more [...]

Thai is both voiced and voiceless… In my previous column, I explained “contrasting” and “non-contrasting” sounds as well as aspirated and unaspirated sounds in Thai. This week, we’ll discuss another important distinction in Thai: “voiced” and “voiceless” sounds. To briefly recap, those sounds we consciously distinguish are called contrasting sounds. Other times, there are multiple [...]

Tackling the nitty gritty of Thai… In the previous installment of this column, I observed that learning to speak Thai means learning to make some new sounds. Today we’ll start to tackle the nitty gritty. From here on, I’ll be using Thai script in addition to the phonetic system used by the AUA language school, [...]