Staff Writer

Thailand, like the majority of SE Asia, has a deeply embedded culture of employing house help. Housekeepers, cooks, gardeners, nannies and drivers are a normal part of the daily fabric of life out here. When expats move to this region they get the opportunity to hand their cleaning chores to others. Some wobble in alarm … Read more

Learning a language is not just about shoveling a bucket of grammar and vocabulary into your head until it explodes. You need to throw a chunk of culture in too. And then blend often, and well. On the culture side, I believe that getting your head around the concept of เกรงใจ /kreng jai/ is an … Read more

We try to make these Thai phrases as brief as we could make. Spoken Thai is mostly inferred anyway so a great deal can easily be left out. Two of the most common words to be left out are ผม/ฉัน /pŏm/chăn/ (I). The polite particles can be thinned out or beefed up too – up … Read more

The topic of Thai pronouns can be a daunting one. With English pronouns we have what are called the nominative case and the objective case. One pronoun acts like the subject of a sentence, and the other acts like the object. But when it comes to learning Thai personal pronouns, especially compared to English pronouns, … Read more

It’s been my observation that when you are advanced in a language, to read you don’t need to recognize each letter. You see words as a coherent whole. And given the context you can guess what the word is quite easy. But at the beginning of learning a language such as Thai, even little differences … Read more

If you want to pronounce Thai language correctly, you need to spend some time making sure that you are pronouncing each letter correctly. Sounds are the basic building blocks of a language, you assemble them first into words and then into sentences. Since Thaiʼs grammar is pretty simple, once you know a bunch of words … Read more