Archive for 'Beginner'

In the previous blog post I talked about Thai motorcycle vocabulary and how to use these words in sentences. This post will help give you practice with those words, as well as reading and spelling them.

You can’t truly explore Thailand on your own without knowing some basic motorcycle related vocabulary, so I’ve compiled a bunch for you below.

Full Kee has nothing to do with the Thai language – it’s a common name for a chinese restaurant. But that name really bothers me because in Thai, ‘kee3’ means s&%t or ‘crap’. As an adult I shouldn’t be amused by this, but really, a restaurant that is full of kee?

In the first part of this series, I talked about how to determine the vowel when it wasn’t visible. In the second part, I talked about how vowels can change its appearance. In this third part, I will show several more vowels that change it’s appearance.

In the first part, I showed how strings of consonants can be pronounced despite not having any visibly defined vowels. I had simplified it as just four easy to remember rules.

In English, words are pronounced left to right. You pronounce the first letter of the word first, and the last letter last. But not so in Thai! Vowels are written above, below, to the left, to the right, and even surrounding the consonants. For a beginner it’s an unintuitive concept.

The word duay3 ด้วย is a multipurpose word that, depending on how it’s used, can have many different meanings in English. It could be translated as ‘by’, ‘together’, ‘with’, ‘out of’, ‘too’, ‘also’, or ‘with’. Sometimes you can tell which to use by identifying the location of surrounding verbs and nouns, but in other cases…

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