Women Learning Thai… and some men too ;-)

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Happy New Year 2012!… Happy New Year everyone! 2012. Wow. That went fast. Are you ready for a new year? I’m not. Not really. And forget about the backlog of posts from the pre-flood days, when you scan through the holes in my longstanding Thai language wish list, you’ll agree that I’m running terribly behind. [...]

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 [...]

Thai reading project: learn Thai with SpeedUpTV + AUA Thai… I’ve got some exciting news. I love the AUA Thai language videos. They are great fun as well as packed with Thai vocabulary and phrases to learn. And here’s the exciting news. Awhile back I got a wild hair about reading along with the AUA [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Word Brain & ClickThai Vocabulary Trainer… I just can’t get enough of free stuff. There’s a lot out there but not all free stuff is good stuff (if you know what I mean). I also have an addiction for the ‘how to learn languages’ type of stuff. Sure, sure, as far as advice goes, there [...]