Thai Language Blog

If you can’t read or speak Thai, you’d have no idea how much English has been adapted into the Thai language. English has been adapted throughout the Thai language, but it’s all written using the Thai alphabet and so badly pronounced that the uninitiated wouldn’t notice.

For example, let’s say you are walking down the street and see dozens of store signs all written in Thai. If you can read Thai, you’d notice that literally half of the signs are entirely English, just spelled out using the Thai alphabet! Why is this? Well, in the US its common to give restaurants and desserts a French name because it sounds fancy-smancy. Give your product a French name, and your customers wouldn’t know better. Why do you think Starbucks uses French words throughout the menu?

Well, in Thai, anything with an English name is considered fancy and high quality. I often joke that if you can speak English with a strong Thai accent, you’d technically be speaking Thai and everyone will understand you . . .

a sign for a Tulip ทิวลิป festival . . . Tulip was stolen from English, which was stolen from French, which got it from Latin, which took it from Persian . . . well, you get the idea!

The Thais have a name for this, ทัพศัพท์. The word ศัพท์ means vocabulary, and คำศัพท์ means vocabulary word. So tap1sap2 means a vocabulary word taken from English. In this post I’ll give you a list of ทัพศัพท์ words you’ll see and use on an almost daily basis. And since they are taken from English, they’ll be easy to remember. The hard part is correctly mis-pronouncing it . . .

Now before we get started, I want to point out a few patterns you’ll notice. First, any word that ends in the letter L will, when pronounced in Thai, make an N sound. If it has an S, change it to a T sound. If the English word has ‘ter’ in it, change it to ‘dter’ with a mid tone. This is because the Thai language pronunciation rules of the Thai alphabet force these sound changes. As for spelling, English words will all use the more common Thai letters, with a preference towards the mid tone on each syllable. Lastly, as mentioned in previous posts, notice the heavy use of the อ์ character to silence a letter, a key hint that the word was taken from another language.

Try to pronounce each word as spelled in Thai:

คอมพิวเตอร์       computer                   kawm pew dter

คอนโดมิเนียม     condominium          kawn do min nium

แอปเปิ้ล               apple                            aep poen

สตรอเบอร์รี         strawberry                 sa dtraw ber ree

แอร์                      air conditioner         air

จอห์น                   John                              jawn

ซอฟต์แวร์            software                      sof waer

โปรแกรม             program                      bpro graem

คุกกี้                      cookie                          gug gee

เค็ก                       cake                               cehk

There are literally thousands more, and you’ll probably remember a few in my previous blog posts, such as words for mob and fake. Remember?

vocabulary:

ทัพศัพท์    tap sap, using English words in Thai

ศัพท์          vocabulary

คำศัพท์     vocabulary word

I will assume by now you’ve learned, or at least tried to learn, the twelve months in Thai. If you’ve been studying for many years and still have trouble remembering, or still can’t spell them, then this method is for you. With all those syllables and a spelling hard to remember, I can’t blame you.

You probably know by now that all Thai months end in one of three possible syllables, kom, yon, or pan. You probably know by now that the last syllable is determined specifically by the number of days within that month. But alas, it takes you forever to remember which is which.

Thankfully, you don’t need to remember! It’s perfectly alright to not say the last syllable. Thais typically do this when they are feeling lazy, or feel it’s over redundant.

For example, you can refer to ตุลาคม as simply ตุลาฯ.

I’d say 30% of the time they’ll simply leave out the last syllable in spoken Thai. They might sometimes get annoyed with you for leaving it out too often, but they’ll always understand what you’re saying.

Now for the lazy mans method of spelling the months – abbreviations! Yeap, the lazy man can abbrev. anything he pleases! Unfortunately, you’ll need to know the last syllable of the month to do it . . . yea, sucks I know . . .

For example, why write out all the crazy letters in กรกฎาคม when you can just write ก.ค.? Can you guess what month พ.ย. is?

Well, here are all the Thai months in its full and abbreviated forms below. Note that you must have a period after each consonant in the abbreviation.

January           มกราคม      ม.ค.       Ma ga raa kom

February        กุมภาพันธ์   ก.พ.       Gum paa pan

March              มีนาคม        มี.ค.       Mee naa kom

April                เมษายน      เม.ย.       May saa yon

May                  พฤษภาคม  พ.ค.       Pa ru sa paa kom

June                 มิถุนายน      มิ.ย.       Mi tu naa yon

July                  กรกฎาคม    ก.ค.       Ga ra ga daa kom

August            สิงหาคม       ส.ค.       Sing ha kom

September     กันยายน     ก.ย.       Gan yaa yon

October           ตุลาคม        ต.ค.       Dtu laa kom

November      พฤศจิกายน พ.ย.       Pa ru sa ji gaa yon

December       ธันวาคม      ธ.ค.       Tan waa kom

Looks hard? Well, if you are saying the month (without the spelling in front of you) and you can’t remember which syllable gets which tone, know that 75% of the syllables in the Thai months use the mid tone. The odds are in your favor!

Just one more note before I end this post . . . I don’t recommend beginners learning the spelling of the months, just pronunciations and abbreviations. The more advanced should sit down and finally learn the full spellings . . .

image credit: thai-bookshop.com

I realize quite a lot of beginners cannot yet read Thai, dramatically reducing the utility of the vocabulary lists on this blog. If you cannot yet read, I recommend making it a priority to learn the Thai alphabet. Many beginners think that they can bypass the reading and just learn speaking as a shortcut. They think they don’t really need to learn how to read, and that it’ll just waste time otherwise better spent learning to speak Thai.

Not true. For a start, learning to read will dramatically improve your spoken pronunciation of the central Thai dialect. Second, you’ll no longer need to bother writing up lists of karaoke (Thai written using the English alphabet) spellings – and every author has his own method of karaoke spellings. Third, you’ll then be able to read Thai on your own, no longer requiring a Thai person to teach you. Fourth, you can chat with your Thai friends on MSN chat and SMS on your phone – Thai people generally can’t read karaoke with bad grammar and confusing spellings.

Learning to speak Thai without learning to read Thai is like trying to learn English without learning the English alphabet. Sounds silly now, doesn’t it?

Thai numbers on a classroom chalkboard.

So what’s the best way to learn to read Thai? Well, first you need to start memorizing the alphabet. There are about 80 characters you need to learn, so do three a day and within a month you’ll have them down. Make sure you practice often. I learned the alphabet when I was in Thailand, so I’d try and pick out letters I knew on signs as I walked/drove passed them. It’s called basic reinforcement learning.

Now memorizing the alphabet is only a small part. Part two will be forming words. This will be hard at first, as Thai doesn’t space out the letters between words. For example, compound words drove me nuts for the longest. Get a Thai children’s book with a large simple font and just practice an hour a day. Within a week it’ll go from painfully hard to just hard.

The next step is learning to spell and building a vocabulary. This will take many years of effort, and there is no shortcut. Just keep reading, looking up words you don’t know, and over time your brain will get faster and faster. And write those words down!

I have a reading material recommendation – comic books. Thai people absolutely love Japanese manga, translated into Thai of course. Lots of pictures to keep you interested and make it understandable by context. You can rent them for mere baht, so they’re incredibly cheap. Look for ones with simple fonts at first, then later try to read manga with difficult to read fonts – it’ll help you read better in the long term, trust me. Obviously, avoid any books that have the potential to put you to sleep, because when learning isn’t fun, your brain will refuse to learn. And don’t push yourself too hard, or you’ll get frustrated and quit! Determine your limit and never push it, as learning a language is a multi-year (and often times decade) commitment.

Executive summary: learning to read Thai, although it might seem to waste time, will make learning spoken Thai easier and faster in the long term.