Women Learning Thai… and some men too ;-)

Compiling a top 100 Thai vocabulary list… Hey all, I need your help putting together a top 100 Thai vocabulary list. The aim is to create a word list for newbies to communicate in Thai at a basic level. Only the barest Thai words are needed, but which ones? I compiled a sample list of [...]

Outing the Energy – Thai Learning Techniques… Unless you are someone who picks up languages by simply breathing, like the famed English explorer Sir Richard Burton, then your journey to becoming fluent in Thai will be a long, hard (but in my opinion, enjoyable) struggle. Wikipedia tells us that By the end of his life, [...]

John Brown’s Body. Thai Style… When Chula University’s marching video (shown below) hit twitter I was gobsmacked. My initial response was: “Words can’t describe how I feel watching that video…” I guess I just wasn’t sure if the parody was intentional or not. On first impression I thought of the powerful USSR propaganda posters. But… [...]

Look Tewada: Child of an Angel? Spoilt brat?… My Thai posts are usually well-researched (as much as I can do, anyway). But, with Thailand’s Children of God: Look Tewada ลูกเทวดา, I took a shortcut. I was slim on time so I quickly checked ลูกเทวดา /lôok tay-wá-daa/ in Thai dictionaries and threw it out for a [...]

Word order in Thai “Wh” Questions… It is common for beginning students of Thai (or students of most foreign languages for that matter) to start off making sentences and answering the teacher’s questions. In fact, quite often the art of ASKING questions is frequently left to much later, and sometimes is forgotten altogether. This is [...]

HouseTalk: Learn Thai washer and dryer phrases… The last laundry post focused on mostly useful laundry phrases. It also introduced Thai manners and a few more things such as do not and must. Amongst the laundry phrases in this post you’ll find the difference between can’t, don’t, and forbidden. And you’ll soon see that the [...]

Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly… I have often heard the advice given to people just learning how to read, that they should practice reading Thai street signs. That made me think, why not collect pictures of a bunch of real signs and compile them into a fun practice reader? Since I am always looking for projects [...]

HouseTalk: Introduction to the laundry section… If you are a gal a percentage of the chats with your Thai housekeeper will focus on the care of your laundry. And if you don’t, you just might find yourself with an eye-raising wardrobe. If you are a guy, well, I’m not a guy so I don’t have [...]

Thailand’s Children of God… I wasn’t sure what to think about the Thai phrase Children of God when I first happened across it. Thailand is Buddhist, right? Not Christian? Curious. So, just who are Thailand’s Children of God? You might already know the concept but not the Thai. When stopped by the police Thailand’s Children [...]

Does Written Thai Need Spaces? Not! I recently read a post titled Reforming Thai Language Structure which advocated changing the Thai written language by adding spaces between words to make written Thai easier to read. The writer mentions that written Thai is a “scriptura continua” language, one that does not use spaces between words. He goes [...]

So you have a Thai maid. Yeah! Now what?… Thailand, like the majority of SE Asia, has a deeply embedded culture of employing house help. Housekeepers, cooks, gardeners, nannies and drivers are a normal part of the daily fabric of life out here. My cherished Filipina amah in Borneo even had a maid back home. [...]

Kinship terms for Thai housekeepers, nannies, drivers, and more… In the last post, What Do You Call Your Thai Housekeeper?, we learned about alternative names for maids in Thailand. During the research, Sarawan (The Parent Vine, Thailand) and I engaged in a discussion about the different terms used for not only housekeepers but drivers, cooks, [...]

What do you call your maid?… When I lived in Japan I was just a short bit of stuff. It was too long ago to remember what our maid was called so I asked someone who would know: Tony Joh from thai-faq.com. Tony informed me that maid in Japanese is either ote or kaseifu. Nice [...]

Miscommunicating with your Thai housekeeper… Have you been to your High Commission or Embassy lately? I have. I won’t say it was a treat, but it was certainly an eyebrow raiser. Did you happen to notice their counter windows? You know, the ones similar to those found in banks? The windows work the same but [...]