Thai: Language Lesson 101

Language Lessons:


Though I have a full “phrase book” for speaking in Thai, my memory is not as “elastic” as it once was. Thai sounds and words have no relationship to anything familiar in English like you might find in Spanish or French or Italian. For example, though it is a foreign language, if you call me an el stupido, I can probably figure out what that means.

However, in Thai, since they don’t even use “our” alphabet, the likelihood that there is similarity in meaning of any of their words is low. I’m committing to learn at least one new word or phrase / day…and I must admit I’m ahead of schedule. However, I’m finding it useless to simply memorize meaningless sounds, so I’m trying to massage the Thai pronunciation so that it is vaguely reminiscent of a phrase with completely different meaning, but similar pronunciation in English.

Here is an example. To say Hello or Good morning, you simply use the phrase Sewat-dee (written here in phonetic English). This is fairly easy for me to remember since it happens to be the name of our favorite new Thai Restaurant in Winston. Given that I’ve memorized the restaurant name previously, it occurs to me that it would have been convenient if they had instead chosen to name their restaurant “Horng nahm tee-nai” (translated, “the bathroom, where?”). This would have been incredibly for any of their patrons who might find themselves traveling in Thailand, and I doubt the non-traveling Winston clientele would be offended as they would likely never bother to look up the translation anyway (it was not til this trip that I found our restaurant was named “hello”).

So, though I already knew Se-wat-dee, I learned that you also have to put another word on the end of the phrase. If you’re a man, you add krub. If you’re a woman, you add kaa. I misunderstood this, thinking that you added the ending word based on WHO you were speaking TO. The logic of this little add-on must be rooted in the deep tradition of cross dressing and transgendered people in Thailand. (there are many of these apparently) Thus, when you greet someone, you are basically saying : Hello, I am a man. (or woman as the case may be). Since I didn’t understand this, for the first 24 hours, I greeted all men I met correctly, but the women, I greeted saying: Hello, I’m a woman. …and to make matters worse, since Thai is a “tonal language” , “how” you say something is as important as what you say. Since I was tentative with the unfamiliar language, when I greeted the women incorrectly with my gentle and low confidence Sewhatdee Kaa, I can assume I was basically saying, hello, I’m a girly boy.
To memorize this phrase, I had to come up with a similar phrase in English. Sewhatdee Krub when said by me sounds awfully close to Say, What dee Crap! This was a helpful pronunciation and memory tool for me. But as I listened to my host say it quickly and informally to people, I realized that it was really more accurate and helpful to slur the phrase like a run-on, generating instead “Sweaty Cop”. I spent my afternoon greeting many of my Thai counterparts on the street this way…said confidently, I sound incredibly local. Sweaty Cop said with a big smile opened many doors.