Women Learning Thai… and some men too ;-)

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Thai golf vocabulary words and their stories… I have always been active in sports. I’ve played college basketball, was on a championship softball team, ran marathons, climbed mountains and got a black belt in karate. And I have never done anything so difficult as to play golf. The game of golf is difficult enough to [...]

Patterns showing verb tenses in Thai… Verb wrappers (aka verb patterns) show how Thai verbs can be used in different tenses. The verbs themselves don’t change, but their ‘wrappers’ do. In the following patterns the verb can be substituted with the Thai verbs listed. The subject can be most nouns, names, and personal pronouns. These [...]

Outing the Energy – Thai Learning Techniques… As I promised last time, today I want to share exercises I use to improve my reading and writing. If you haven’t gotten around to studying reading and writing yet I know exactly how you feel. I went for about 20 years thinking that simply speaking Thai was [...]

Basic Thai flood phrases… In my last post, the Primer on Thai Disaster Words, I shared flood vocabulary found in Thai conversations, TV, and Thai Newspapers. If you’ve found yourself in Thailand during the floods, the few phrases below will help you to communicate at a basic level with your Thai neighbours and friends. Please [...]

Primer on Thai disaster words… The Thai great floods of 2554 have affected almost everyone in the country. The rains in Chiang Mai, where I live, have subsided and the floods only lasted a short while. But the water had to go somewhere, and it did. And now Ayudhaya and Bangkok are getting the water [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Spicing up your life Thai-style… There is a basic difference between the philosophy behind western food and Thai food. Back home, a cook will make a dish the way it “should” be made. One may add to a dish by shaking a bit of salt and maybe a dash of pepper but if you want [...]

How many rainy seasons are you?… I was watching TV the other day and the announcer came on and told us that His Majesty the King was 83 พรรษา /pan-​sǎa/. I did a little guessing as we all need to do when picking up a foreign language and figured that they were telling us the [...]

A house is a home… In English the word “house” indicates a structure whereas “home” includes the idea that this is where you “live”, thus we have the song “A House is Not a Home”. But all my Thai dictionaries (I have 8 now) define “house” and “home” the same – บ้าน /bâan/ บ้าน /bâan/ [...]

Supermarkets in Thailand… If you are going to live in Thailand, one of the things you will find yourself doing is food shopping. When I first came to Thailand there were no such things as supermarkets. Now they are as ubiquitous as Thailand’s outdoor markets. They may not be as much fun or as exciting [...]

Is that a กัน /gan/ in your pocket?… One thing I like to do as a vocabulary building exercise is when I come across a word that I find is often used paired up with other words (making compounds) I like to see how many different combinations I can come up with. Of course it [...]