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Photo: Some of the books I've been using in my attempt to learn the language What's On This Page?
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Thailand - Language
Tourists will inevitably pick up the words for 'hello' and 'thank you' soon enough and the more adventurous ones may even learn how to ask the price of things and ask for their restaurant bill in Thai. Learning a little more though can be extremely useful and it's not that difficult. Just learning how to count is a good thing and can be learnt easily in a couple of hours. Some of the more unscrupulous Thais will try it on with foreign tourists and if you can pick out numbers you can sometimes work out how much they are trying to rip you off by. When negotiating prices, if you can do it in Thai it gives the impression that you have been around a bit and are not quite as gullible as they think. Con artists in Thailand prefer targetting first time visitors who are still wet behind the ears and knowing a few Thai words gives the impression you know the ropes, even if you are a first time visitor. Apart from the cynical reasons there are practical reasons too. If you stray a little from the beaten tourist path you will almost certainly meet Thais who don't speak any English. I don't know what the statistics are but there are a lot more Thais who can't speak any English compared to those who can, especially in the older generation. Being able to speak a few words is really appreciated by non-English speaking Thais and if you want to buy something or get some information it is invaluable. Besides, it's nice just to be able to say hello and offer some small talk instead of just smiling like a dumb tourist.
Wherever I go I always hear the 'farang alert' as I approach. The first Thai to see me lets all her buddies know there is a farang approaching. I can't always make out exactly what is being said but I can pick out farang quite easily. This is the other thing that surprises me. Even if Thais know that few foreigners speak Thai, surely they must know that almost every tourist understands what a farang is? This still doesn't deter them from using the word liberally in the presence of farangs. Normally the interest is because the farang is a potential customer for whatever they are trying to sell and of course all farangs, without exception, are extremely rich. I have been assessed by groups of girls before who quite openly tell each other what they think of me and whether they like me or not. I don't mind this but take exception to the "mai chawp" (don't like) comments. Asking them "Thammai mai chawp?" (why don't you like?) takes them by surprise and if you're lucky you may even get one to blush.
He goes round saying "khrap, khrap, khrap". Based on my conversations with him in English it is probably an appropriate word for what he talks although the spelling I tend to use is slightly different. So come on, you don't want to be like Mr Crap, do you?
Pitfalls Learning The Language
Thai uses a completely different alphabet to English. This means that even if you master speaking some Thai you may still not be able to read or write anything. It also means that Thai words need to be transliterated in order for them to be written in English. There is no agreed standard for this and books vary. In fact I have not yet seen two books that use the same system. Should the Thai word for rice be written as 'khao' or 'kow'? It's not so bad if you have your own system for taking down notes but if you use a variety of phrase books and dictionaries the differences between each one can be confusing. The pronunciation of certain words can be tricky. Just as Thais have difficulty pronouncing certain English words, English speakers have difficulties with certain Thai words. Personally I find it difficult to pronounce words that begin with 'ng'. Other words require you to contort your face to get the right sound. The Thai word for friend is shown in some phrase books as 'peu-un' with a falling tone. A native English speaker might try to say this starting the word with pursed lips. However, to get the right sound I have to adopt what I think of as a wide-mouthed frog look. For the same object or action there may be several Thai nouns or verbs based on the level of politeness. 'Taan', for instance is a polite form of the verb 'to eat' but in everyday conversation most Thais will use 'gin'. However, if they are talking to their boss at work or any superior person they will use 'taan'. This is just one example and there are many. The first problem when learning the language is learning the different words and then understanding what words to use to whom. To cap it all there is a completely different set of vocabulary used by and when speaking to the royal family. Even at the same level of politeness there may be three different words for the same thing. Different nouns use different classifiers. There are some general rules about these, for example, certain classifiers are used for fruit and other for round objects. This means though that different classifiers could be used for an orange. Although there are some rules, for the Thai student it is a case of learning the correct classifiers to use. In all language there are certain things that just have to be learnt. Audio CDs and CD-ROMs for computers are OK but there is no substitute for actually having a teacher. It helps too if the teacher can speak fairly good English. At times, watching the shape of the person's mouth as they say the word is the only way of learning. I paid for a course of 10 lessons and if you are interested I have annotated by lessons into notes. Notes from my Thai language lessons. So does this mean I can now speak and understand the language? Not at all. When Thais start going in full flow I normally don't understand a word but if they speak slowly I can sometimes understand a little. Apparently the folks from Chiang Mai speak slower so that might be better for me but they speak quickly in the south. I can ask some basic questions and it has been useful in remote places where people don't speak any English just knowing a few phrases and numbers. When Thais are speaking in a group I can sometimes pick out enough words to understand the subject of the conversation even if I can't understand the details. Yet another issue is that many Thai strangers don't expect you (a farang) to be able speak any Thai so if you do it takes them a while to cotton on that you are actually attempting Thai words. When the penny drops they can sometimes then understand. It makes me feel better that in America some people cannot understand me when I speak English and I know that my English is OK even if I do have a strange East London accent. One thing that puzzles is me here is why some Thais won't answer me in Thai if I ask a question in Thai. This happens regularly. On the bus one day was a gatoey conductor collecting the fares. I asked him how much the fare was in Thai. He tried to answer in English. The fare was Bt14 but it was impossible to understand if this was 14 or 40 because his English was not good. If he had said the Thai "sip sii" it would have been clear to me and very different to "sii sip". Another thing shopkeepers will do when you ask the price in Thai is insist on displaying the price on a calculator. If they go to do this they must have understood the question and if you asked in Thai surely that must indicate to them that you might just understand the answer? I had this happen to me and the guy couldn't find his calculator so he spent two minutes hunting around trying to find it. I said "Just tell me!" When he did I understood perfectly and that was all I wanted to know. Learning Thai takes effort and determination. Just living in Thailand isn't enough. I think it is quite shameful but I can understand why foreigners who have lived in Thailand for five years or more speak hardly any Thai, especially if they live in a community with lots of other expats. I have to keep forcing myself to learn more. My problem is that I have reached a basic level where I can just about get by but now I find it difficult to motivate myself to continue learning. Becoming fluent seems like such a huge mountain to climb it is easy to convince myself I will never get to that level so I become apathetic.
Good Things About Learning The Language Grammatically, Thai is a lot easier than English. The different verb tenses that exist in English don't exist in Thai. Verbs stay the same. The tense is determined by the context of the sentence and additional words used in the sentence. For someone studying English, learning all of the different verb conjugations must be a nightmare. Sentence structure is very basic and pronouns are not used very often. For a sentence such as, "What would you like to eat?", the Thai would be, "Yaak gin arai" - literally "like eat what"? Often, when Thais speak English and sound very abrupt it is only because they are performing a word by word translation from the Thai. Note: Although the implied tense should be easy to determine in the context of a Thai sentence the Thais don't make this easy for new students of the language. "Tham arai?" means basically, "What are you doing," ie. present tense. On one occasion I tried to see an eye doctor but he had already gone home. The receptionist kept asking me, "Tham arai?" I couldn't understand what she meant. What am I doing? I'm talking to you, isn't it obvious? What she was trying to ask was what did I want to do? Did I want to see that particular doctor tomorrow or did I want to see another doctor on the same day? If she had asked, "Khun ma tham arai?" 'ma' indicates future tense so I would probably have understood. The Thais can be pretty lazy when speaking which is fine when talking among themselves but a bit unfair when speaking to foreigners. I realise they have difficulty understanding English so when speaking to a Thai I use a very correct version of English. I would never dream of speak using slang terms appropriate at a football match but effectively this is what they do. One of the earliest examples of this I came across was the use of "yip" instead of "yii-sip" for the number 20. They might say something costs "yip haa" meaning 25 but to the untrained ear it sounds a bit like "sip haa" which is 15.
Generally this is quite poor. It is better in the major tourist areas and bar girls have an English vocabulary all of their own. I can count on one hand the Thai people I have met who can speak fluent English. Even Thais who teach English cannot converse properly. A young girl I know asked me to help her with her school work. Before I started I tried a few phrases with her keeping everything in the present simple tense. This was beyond her. I asked her to count and she got started making mistakes after 12. She had been learning English at school for five years. In my opinion there are several reasons for this:
Another motivating factor for trying to learn the written language is due to the fact I am effectively illiterate in Thailand. I cannot remember a time in my life when I couldn't read or write English so not being able to read or write Thai is not a situation I'm happy with in Thailand. It's not ideal having to ask every sawng-thaew driver where he is going because I can't read the destinations written on the side of his vehicle. I am already facing many problems and I have barely started to learn. For a start there is a completely new alphabet to learn and I have problems remembering how to write the letters. There are many Thai consonants that have the same English consonant sound (for example, six different consonants for a 't' sound) and my text books refer to obsolete letters but I don't know if I can ignore these. There are high, middle and low consonant classes which have nothing to do with high and low tones. I don't know why this is but I think I ought to as it is important! There are tone markers above some letters in addition to vowels. Consonants have different sounds dependent on whether they are at the beginning or the end of a syllable. Vowels can come before, after, below or above consonants so looking at the first letter of a word doesn't necessarily mean the word begins with the sound that letter makes. Another problem is that there are no spaces between the words in sentences. It is a feat for me to read single words at the moment but to separate the individual words in a sentence is currently an impossibility.
What has struck me more than anything is how straightforward a lot of the written language is. Even after a day or two I was able to start recognising words and separate words from within sentences. It has started to open up a whole new world and I am a bit disappointed I didn't begin learning earlier. For some reason I convinced myself that learning written Thai would be too difficult. My perception was that learning to speak would be enough of a struggle without trying to learn a whole new alphabet at the same time. I should at least have made an effort to familiarise myself with the written language earlier. Apart from the obvious benefit of being able to read things, it helps with pronunciation. If you look in three different phrase books you will probably see three different ways of transliterating a Thai word or phrase into Romanised English. It's a mess. Once you begin to understand the Thai letters the ambiguity disappears. If you can't write Thai and make notes of your spoken Thai lessons using English words it's not too bad because you at least know what you meant. The problem with transliterating from Thai to English is that every transliteration is open to interpretation if read by different people. Thai consonants are fairly straightforward, it's just a case of remembering what they look like and what sound they make. Consonant sounds sometimes change depending whether they come at the beginning or the end of a syllable. The Thai word for 'maybe' has a double consonant in the middle but because the first consonant is the final letter of the first syllable and the second identical consonant is the first letter of the second syllable they have different sounds. The letter has a 't' sound if it is final consonant but a 'j' sound if it is an initial consonant. The Thai word sounds something like aat-ja. Remember, the 't' sound and the 'j' sound in this word are the same Thai consonant. There are more consonants than there are in English but, as in English, some are used a lot more frequently than others so the common ones keep appearing. I am still not sure if there is a reason why there are several different consonants which have the same sound. I know now why there are different classes of consonant and this has to do with tones. For words without tone marks, the tone of a syllable can be worked out by knowing the consonant class and whether or not the vowel in that syllable is live or dead, short or long. The vowels are quite complex. There are lots of them and they are sometimes used alone and sometimes used in combinations. A certain vowel sound might be expressed by two vowels with a consonant in between. However, the word begins with the consonant sound and words are ordered in dictionaries by the consonant sound, not by the first letter in the word. Words that begin with a vowel sound aren't allowed to be written starting with a vowel so to satisfy this rule there is a special consonant used at the beginning of those words in the written form. It is silent and for all intents and purposes can be ignored. The example used above (the Thai word for 'maybe') is one such word. It begins with an 'aa' sound so is written starting with the silent consonant. Everyone has their own preferred methods for learning. I like to start slowly and understand the basics before getting in too deep. I cannot remember detail if I don't know the basics so trying to learn too much at first is self-defeating. This applies to anything including computer languages as well as spoken languages. I have been concentrating on spoken words I am familiar with and then looking to see how they are written in Thai. After learning some consonants and vowels I have found I can pronounce some words written in Thai that I don't know and make a fairly decent job of the pronunciation. Reading is easier than writing. I can recognise certain letters but can't always remember how to write them. To help with this I bought a kiddie's book which is intended for Thai children of about three years-old to learn their own language. It has all the letters in dot form and to practice writing it is just a case of joining the dots. The book was Bt35 and works pretty well for me. Another problem is the variety of fonts used, especially the very plain fonts. Thai letters have lots of loops and squiggles but these are omitted with some fonts. As I progress I will probably add some more thoughts here. My message to people learning spoken Thai is not to ignore the written language. It looks hellishly complicated and not much different to Egyptian hieroglyphics but it's actually quite logical and not half as difficult as it appears. There are a few strange aspects to the language which cannot be explained. They are that way just because they are. However, it's nothing compared to the English language which is full of weird, unexplainable things. As native English speakers we don't even think about these things but if you start to teach English and try to answer questions from students about weird things you will discover there are no proper answers. Foreigners learning Thai have it pretty easy compared to Thais trying to learn English.
I am now quite familiar with several common consonants and vowels and can even remember how to write some of them. I have noticed that several of the consonants rarely appear. Some consonants are only used for a handful of words so it isn't actually that important to remember them. There may be 44 Thai consonants but their usage is very uneven. The vowels are still tough. I can remember a few easy ones but some vowel combinations consist of five separate parts that come before, above and after the consonant. You don't get much for free in Thailand but an exception is with Thai vowels. Some words just consist of two consonants but you get a free short 'o' sound, as in 'lot'. For example, take the Thai word for 'fresh' which sounds something like 'sot'. Written in Thai this word consists of just two consonants. The first consonant is 'Sor Sua'. Of the three Thai consonants that have an 'S' sound this one seems to be the most common. The second consonant is 'Dor Dek'. This letter has a 'D' sound if it is a beginning consonant but a 'T' sound if it is a final consonant. So, we have an 'S' sound at the beginning of the word, a 'T' sound at the end and we get a free 'o' in the middle to give us 'sot'. 'Sor Sua' is a high-class consonant. The ending 'T' makes the syllable a dead syllable and the 'o' is a short vowel. The tone rules for high initial consonant class, dead syllable and short vowel give the word a low tone. Simple, eh? With some other words you get two free vowels. How's that for generosity? Let's look at another example. The generic word for cakes or pastries in Thai sounds something like 'kanom' and bread is 'kanom pang' but here I am only interested in the first word. With 'kanom' there are no written vowels but you get two free ones. The word is written in Thai with just three consonants. The first is 'Khor Khai', one of the three Thai consonants with a 'K' sound (there used to be five). Next up is 'Nor Noo' and then 'Mor Maa'. It looks like 'knm' but because of the free vowel rule you get an 'a' (as in cat) between the first two consonants and then an 'o' (as in lot) between the second and third consonants. Thanon, the Thai word for 'Street' is exactly the same. It is basically written 'tnn' but two free vowels are thrown in for free. As mentioned before, some vowels are used to satisfy language rules but remain silent. This leaves a situation where you use vowels that aren't written and don't use vowels that are written. When I try to read words I don't know and see consecutive consonants, what do I do? Are they there to form a consonant cluster such as 'GR' or do I get a free vowel to put in the middle? With sentences I still have lots of problems separating words, and with words I have problems separating syllables. This is a big problem in Thai because of the way consonant sounds change depending whether they are an initial or final consonant. Trying to learn spoken and written Thai is one of the biggest mental challenges I have faced in a while but it's good fun. I would die of boredom sat on a beach or in a bar all the time. I still have some unanswered questions. I now understand why there are several consonants for the same sound if the class of the consonant makes a difference to the tone. I could understand if there were three consonants for each sound, a low-class, mid-class and high-class. However, this isn't how it works. Let's take the 'T' sound, for example. There are four 'T' sound consonants with a low-class initial consonant class and two with a high-class initial consonant class? Why? Aren't a few of these redundant? Some Thai consonants have already become obsolete (Kor Kuat, Khor Khon) but to me it looks like there are others that aren't really necessary either.
(More information on learning resources can be found on this page.) However, don't overlook what is available everywhere in Thailand aimed at Thai kids. The written language is difficult even for the Thais to master and, even though I hate to say it, many Thais aren't the greatest of students. There is, therefore, a plethora of learning material available to Thai children which I have found to be extremely useful. On the wall by my desk are pinned two copies of the same wallchart. I have two copies because on one side are consonants and on the other side are vowels. They are pinned to the wall for a reason. If I have to refer to books it is a physical effort I have to make and I only do it when I need a specific piece of information.
On my charts I have annotated (in English transliterated phrases) the character name. With the consonants, I have made a note which English consonants the Thai character resembles at the beginning and end of a syllable. With the vowels, I have written Thai words (in Thai) I am familiar with that use the particular vowel. I use the kids' books to practice writing. Each page has a different Thai character in join-the-dots form with guidance (simple arrows) on how to write the character. All this kind of stuff is cheap - Bt30 or something - but very useful.
It isn't used very much. Classrooms at some Thai schools use it and I guess this is as much about teaching it to Thai students as anything else. Generally it isn't used, the Thais just use Arabic numerals the same as most of the Western world. Having a set of numbers unrecognised by foreigners is handy though, especially when hiding dual pricing scams.
Using Your Computer to Input Thai I reached a stage where I wanted to start writing some Thai words on my computer. There is some good advice at Thai-Language.com about this but, to be honest, I got quite confused about ASCII, ANSI, Unicode, TIS-620, ISO standards, etc., and I come from an IT background! Here is a very simple version because my brain likes simple things. However, I can only talk about my current set up which is Windows XP. If you use a Mac or an old version of Windows you are on your own. First you need to add 'Thai Kedmanee' to your keyboard input options so that when you press a key a Thai character appears instead of the English one that is written on the key. This is done through the Windows Control Panel and it isn't difficult to do. There are instructions at the Thai-Language.com site. When you have done this, a little keyboard icon will appear on your toolbar. When you click on it you have the option to select from whatever keyboard input languages are installed on your machine. In the English mode when you press 'P' you get a 'p' - funnily enough. Switch over to Thai Kedmanee, press the 'P' again and you will get a 'Yor Yak' (ย). Because Thai has a lot more characters than English (and because there are no upper and lower cases), for some letters you will need to use the shift key. Hold down the shift key and press 'P' again (while still in the 'Thai Kedmanee' input mode) and you will get a 'Yor Ying' (ญ). Your next problem is knowing what key is what when inputting in Thai and there are a few different solutions. You can experiment pressing keys, noting what characters appear, and try to remember but that is difficult. You can look around for an image of an English/Thai keyboard (there are some on the Internet) and refer to it each time you type.
Alternatively, you can buy little stickers for your keyboard keys that have both the English and Thai characters on. These are very cheap in Thailand (I paid Bt60) but more expensive if bought abroad. Microsoft seem to support non-English languages quite well now so what I have just explained will work in applications such as Notepad, Wordpad and Word, etc, provided they are fairly recent. (Maybe even old versions? I don't know, but you can try.) The problem I have is that my text editor of choice for web pages (TextPad) doesn't support Unicode very well. Attempting to do what I have just explained results in nonsense characters appearing. It's a real pain and from what I can gather - from the TextPad bulletin boards - maintenance and further development of TextPad has come to an end which is very sad. What I have to do if I want to display Thai characters using TextPad as an editor is use decimal codes. A list of these for each Thai character can be found at Alan Wood's Unicode Resources. So, if I want to display a 'Yor Yak' character using this method I type ย into my editor and hopefully when I view the page in a web browser it will appear correctly. That's how the Thai characters on this page were created. Ideally I would like a TextPad upgrade to handle this but that's looking highly unlikely. Until I find another text editor I like as much as I like TextPad I will stick to this rather unsatisfactory and cumbersome method.
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