Learning to speak thai is both fun, challenging, and a supremely daunting task. It is so completely unlike english that summoning up the courage to speak it aloud to a stranger can be quite unnerving for the novice. Thai is a tonal language, i.e. the same word can have a completely different meaning depending on the tone used when pronounced. There are 5 different tones to use when speaking thai.

A common example used to illustrate the tones is:

“măi mai mái mâi?” (rising, mid, high, falling) translates as “Does new wood burn well?”

Another example is:
Glài: far (low)
Glai: near (mid)
Glai-Glai: close to/near-ish (mid, mid)

After being here just over seven months, I have roughly the vocabulary of a Thai three year-old, so I’m about to start language lessons very soon. In the mean time I thought I’d share some valuable tips for speaking Thai that I’ve learned the hard way.

Calling a girl soo-eye (rising) is saying she’s beautiful.
Calling a girl soo-eye (falling) is saying she’s bad luck. Be careful of that one. Many is the prospective future Mrs Robbie who walked away in disgust after I used that as a pickup line.

I also once tried to tell a Thai girl that she had a nice smile. She didn’t understand me so I pointed at my mouth and grinned while saying “you know…smiling?” All she understood was my bared teeth and the word “ling” which means monkey in Thai. She thought I was trying to tell her she looked like a monkey when she grinned. Needless to say I didn’t get to ask her for her phone number.

Regarding food, gwai-tee-ow is noodle soup, and the g is pronounced as a hard consonant. But if you say it too hard, as in “kwai-tee-ow”, it loosely translates as penis-soup. Kinda makes you wonder what the bridge over the famous river on the thai-burmese border has flowing beneath it.

This last one is definitely one not to mix up in front of a waitress. “Jim jum”is a delicious soup but, if you accidentally transpose the words, “jum jim” means to insert something in a woman’s front-bottom. Order that one with care. You’ve been warned, I only wished I had!

I do however get some revenge and satisfaction when I catch the BTS skytrain every morning, as Thais have difficulty in saying l,r, and v. Some of the stations link up with the new underground subway system, which has been closed again due to safety problems. On the skytrain when approaching one of the link-up stations, the female voice-over tries to remind us that “the subway is tempo-la-la-lly closed”.

The next time I screw up by telling some pretty girl that she’s bad luck and has a face like a monkey, I take comfort in the fact that my bad thai is only a “tempo-lally” thing. Practice makes perfect.

Got any Thai tongue-twisters or Farang faux pas’ of your own to share?