Handy lingo snippets...

[Snowman71]

...is there anywhere I can start brushing up on some handy lingo snippets for my impending return ? At present I'm limited to very little Thai and it seems to me that having some broad knowledge of the lingo is a very useful piece of one's armoury .

 

Thanks in advance...

 

PS What does the "5 5 5 5 5 5 5" that keeps cropping up in messages mean ???...

[elef]

If you say 5 in thai it's "ha".

[mattwasp]

Though if you did say 5 5 5 5 with the right tone you would sound like a bit of a stuck record / psycho.

 

On the topic of learning lingo snippets - this is quite a good website: http://www.learningthai.com/speak_thai.html

 

...and of course, there are numerous 'teach yourself' books/CDs available at all good bookshops.

 

If you want to learn it, you'll find you get more out of 2 weeks in the country than 6 months of self teaching, though I've found that the self teaching books are good at clearing up some of the finer detail in between trips.

 

Other that that, they're all fatally flawed in that they tend not to do anything apart from give you some phrases without explaining the sentence structure. Not very important at first, but annoying when you want to say something similar to a phrase you know and change the meaning. You might have got 'Unit 2, exercise 1' down to a tee but if the poor fruit seller strays from the well rehearsed 'Teach Yourself' script you're lost!

 

I would suggest an unorthadox approach - learn all the 'connecting' words quite early on; Things like 'if...then..' and '..because..' and 'but..' and so on, then when you have a couple of phrases under your belt and alcohol in your bloodstream you start to fool YOURSELF that you're fluent: "If it's going to rain later then I don't want to go to the beach" for example. It might be wrong but you always learn more when you're confident.

 

Make mistakes and listen to the corrections - Thai people, as most people, are forgiving if an attempt is made to speak to them in their own language, and are largely very patient teachers.