A couple of holidays back I realised that certain Thai language conversations that were directed at me and by that I mean the ones that I understood, I was able to answer literally immediately without first thinking out the question and answer in English. Don’t get me wrong my answers were and still would be fairly loose and tonally weak but I have actually partly reached the no need to translate easy conversation stage. Anything bordering difficult then I have to revert to translating the few words that I understand in English and try to work out the sentence. Small progress but nonetheless progress indeed.

Glad to see you are introducing these link words like bon and tai because I do know quite a lot of Thai words but have difficulty in putting them together and these kind of links will be of great use.
Martyn´s last blog ..The Thai Two Finger Salute

Reminds me of someone who wrote on a Thai language forum about how he regularly needed to tell the taxi “turn left immediately after the bridge”. For a long time he just translated that sentence from English, but it didn’t sound right, and sometimes confused the taxi drivers.

So he finally asked a Thai how to say it, and they told him to use ลงสะพานเลี้ยวซ้าย (long saphaan líao sáai), which literally means “descend (from) the bridge, turn left”, but is good colloquial Thai for “turn left immediately after the bridge”.

The problem of language interference never *really* goes away. I don’t translate from English when I speak Thai in general, but when there’s some concept or word that I don’t know how to express, it’s unavoidable.

But for basic language use, when you find yourself speaking without translating, even if only for a few common phrases, you’re making good progress. Or better yet, when you start having trouble explaining what the English meaning of some Thai word or phrase even is. You just use it without thinking about it.
Rikker Dockum´s last blog ..Rock the vote

You hit the nail on the head there…That has been a tough thing to forgo because I keep trying to construct sentences that way and they never work. I guess on a technical level they kinda work but when spoken I get looks like I am riding on the short bus.