5.21.2010
5.20.2010
5.19.2010
5.18.2010
5.17.2010
Yesterday's
2. ปลงใจ - to make a decision, make up one's mind.
5.15.2010
5.14.2010
One month worth of words
1. Important
2. Really
3. Question
4. Sleep
5. Again
6. Write
7. To help
8. Monday
9. To use
10. Of, belonging to
11. Every
12. Tuesday
13. Wednesday
14. Fast
15. Thursday
16. To read
17. Present participle, -ing
18. To come
19. He/she (3rd person singular pronoun)
20. Future tense participle; “will –“ (used this twice)
21. We (1st person plural pronoun)
22. (duplicate)
23. foreign
24. Friday
25. To go
26. “must-… “need to…”
27. weather
28. comparitive degree particle “more…”
29. to see, look
30. Saturday
31. Car
32. Because
33. Station
34. City/town
35. To practice
36. Maybe
37. Table
38. Student
39. Tired, sleepy
40. Spider
41. Market
42. Beautiful
43. Pineapple
44. Music
45. Explain
46. Mango
47. Magazine
48. Although
49. Hungry
50. To begin
51. Thirsty
52. To prepare
53. To change
54. Way, method
55. Problem
56. To wait
57. To enjoy
58. Month
59. To remember
60. Difficult
61. Easy
62. Week
2. จึง - therefore. Sometimes it's little connecting words like these that really polish up your speech. Instead of churning out choppy small sentences and letting the listener make the (hopefully) obvious connections on their own (which sounds like beginner's speech) having some conjunctions and connective words like this makes a train of thought much more fluid. They're often small to begin with, and (at least in Thai and Chinese) don't conjugate or change form; they just hold a place, and that's it. Good stuff to know.
5.13.2010
5.11.2010
5.10.2010
2. คอย - to wait. (this is also part of the word for 'watch tower' (or one of them, anyway). It's หอคอย, but for the one we use in service, it's หอสังเกตการณ์. Yeah. Longer. The former actually means 'waiting tower' whereas the latter one is a tower for watching, but they're both translated as watchtower. I can see why the latter is more appropriate.
5.09.2010
Today's
2. วิธี - way, method.
Yesterday's
1. หิวน้ำ - thirsty. This shouldn't even really count, because it's 'hungry' with water tacked on at the end. Really just a more specific word. Same vocabulary.
2. เตรียม - to prepare, to ready.
5.08.2010
5.06.2010
2. วรสาร- magazine.
Nothing much to say about these at the moment. Trying to think of things that I'll actually USE in day to day speech. My Pimsleur Thai is all finished, so I've got to work on sentences and conversation and stringing words together on my own. I haven't any circumstances to be able to speak Thai with people (yet), and therefore no way to be corrected or get in some good linguistic trial and error time, so...
Hmmmph.
5.05.2010
5.04.2010
2. ดนตรี - music. Thinking I'm going to watch a Thai movie tonight heavily based around music. Who doesn't love music? I've got some Thai music I found recently, too. Modern Dog, Slot Machine, Bodyslam... (interesting names, at least). I'd like to try to find the lyrics online, but I haven't looked yet. That would be nice.
2. สวย - beautiful! This sounds very similar to the Taiwanese (台語) word for beautiful, which I think is actually a bastardization of 帥, (and Cantonese is kind of similar too) which actually means handsome. That's what I think. They could all have a common root elsewhere. But I think I'm right.
5.03.2010
The rest of yesterday's post
2. แมงมุม - spider. Just because...
Thailand has some fascinating spider species. There are none native to Taiwan, but Thailand (and SE Asia in general) boasts some beautiful, but very aggressive and very dangerous tarantula species.
5.02.2010
Missed a day!!!
1. โต๊ะ - Table. This is marked as a loan word from Chinese, actually, and I can see how it might be so. The Chinese is 桌子, and Thai doesn't so much have that initial sound, so I can see how it'd become ต instead of kind of a hard 'zh', something like the J in John, but harder.
2. นักเรียน - student. This is cool: นัก is a particle that makes a thing a noun, that noun being "the person who does...." whatever, similar to the suffix -er, like with teach-er. รียน means to study or learn. Therefore, นักเรียน is a person who studies, a student. These little bits of knowledge are helpful, since that prefix can be used with other verbs, and that verb is useful on its own.
(tomorrow's post to come shortly)
4.30.2010
Thai Dictation
2. บางที - maybe, perhaps. (This word, in some contexts, apparently also means 'sometimes')
I spent a few hours yesterday with Thai, writing charts and practice sentences and making little notes on grammar bits and such. The best thing I got to doing yesterday was to listen to example sentences and write them down as I listened, and then check my spelling afterward. Most were vocabulary words I've already 'learned' or at least know how to say and recognize, but spelling is kind of hard. So that was great practice.
4.29.2010
Read Thai Signs!
2. เมือง - city, land, town. This word is used in signs and such on the highway to indicate that you're heading into or out of town, but it apparently is also colloquially used to refer to a town, area, or even nation. Dunno.
Also, www.learnthaionline.com is a great resource for practice and materials. I especially like their Read Thai Signs portion. They've compiled and categorized signs and things in Thai, and progressively reveal what they say. First they will show the Thai as written on a computer (as the sign or script is sometimes stylized or handwritten; a good way to practice identifying all the characters this way), then the phonetics, and finally the English meaning. Great practice for those that can already read a bit of Thai, and enormously helpful with identifying and learning useful vocabulary, since it comes from everyday situations. Both of today's vocabulary words come from the Read Thai Signs exercise. Really great.
4.28.2010
2. เพราะว่า - because
I'm having some trouble thinking of nouns I want to learn. I feel like these are more an "in context" acquisition, so I'm trying to write a lot in Thai. Sentences, phrases, things describing my day. Problem is, there's stuff that I can SAY that I don't know how to write, but I'd rather learn brand new words on here than just how to write words I already know. I'm kind of making notes on those on my own in my notebook and confining the two words a day to brand new words, but I'm also seeing the need for a better solution to a dictionary than just my blackberry. I can neither read nor write in Thai (or Chinese) on it.
4.27.2010
2. วันเสาร์ - Saturday
The difficulty now is keeping up with al the words... learning the new ones and not forgetting the old ones. Mostly the writing. I can remember how to say them (sometimes forget the correct tone) but don't always remember how to spell them correctly. Practice.......
4.25.2010
Verbs in isolating languages... yum
2. ต้อง - auxiliary verb "must..." "need to/has to...".
I'm including a lot of verb stuff, it seems, and less nouns or other parts of speech. I feel like in many regards, in the most survivalist aspect of communication, you can get by without nouns better than verbs. Pointing, acting or drawing can all convey what THING you need or want or are talking about. This in combination with the appropriate verb will go an excellently long way toward conveying your meaning to someone.
This is wonderfully, greatly, especially so with a language like Thai (or Chinese). Since they don't conjugate their verbs (or over-abuse them like test tube born lab rat experimental overworked sweat shop hamsters on wheels; really difficult stuff) like they do in Russian, we can get tons of mileage from one single Thai verb. Have we discussed this? I think maybe so. Whether you did it or I did or they did, no matter if it was last year or tomorrow or just recently or in what condition, the verb itself rarely changes. Most often what changes is the stuff around it: words like "today" or "yesterday" or "last year" will indicate exactly when something happened, and the pronouns will indicate the subject and object. This means that a few really useful verbs accompanied by two or three really useful auxiliary verbs already enables the speaker to convey an enormous amount of meaning that might be much more complicated in other languages. This is great; I'm gonna work that verb angle with Thai.
4.24.2010
2. ชอบ - to like, prefer, to be fond of.
Interested to see how fractured and complicated are the common/polite/familiar/rude (?) Thai pronouns are. Chinese is thankfully void of gratuitous honorifics. Thai seems to have a few, but I'm not sure how prolifically they're used.
4.22.2010
4.21.2010
2. มา- come. Chinese is very specific about when you can use "come" and "go." We are less so in English. Where we might call a friend and say "I might come over later" meaning "I might go to your house later," in Chinese this would not be correct. You only use "come" when you are already at the place being referred to; in like manner, you only "go" when you are not at that place. In English, it seems acceptable to use "come" if the person to whom you are speaking is already at the aforementioned location (as with "coming" to someone's house).
This strict distinction in Chinese makes sense, and we do have it in English; it makes things clearer. We don't stick to it as stringently as they do in Chinese though. Not sure how Thai goes with this, but I feel it might be similar.
2. อ่าน - to read
Going to try working on my list of 20-25 most important verbs. Pimsleur teaches a lot of them since they're basic and useful (eat, speak, understand, etc) but as circumstances and uses expand, so will need for other verbs, but the right 25 will still get you a long way, especially in a language like Thai.
4.20.2010
4.18.2010
4.17.2010
Warning: Grammar Content
ใช้- to use. This is with regards to general use of anything, but I noticed in the dictionary that it's also the word to use regarding money and time, whereas we would use a different verb: spend. There are apparently other words for spend, but ใช้ can be used either by itself or with a few other words specifically to describe use of money or time.
French is kind of notorious for having specific verbs for specific things [I don’t speak French; an example I’ve heard is for ‘grow.’ While trees, kids, animals and love can all grow in English, a good friend and fluent French speaker says all these would be different verbs in French.] I’m interested to see how versatile Thai verbs are (or aren’t), but I get the impression it’s far more like Chinese, being able to get tons of mileage out of the uses for one single word.
2. ของ - of, belonging to, etc. It’s a possessive marker, like the 的 in Chinese. Does the exact same thing, except it comes before the possessor. So where in Chinese, the word for you, 你, would combine with the possessive 的 to make 你的, your or yours, ของ would come before the possessor. The second person pronoun in Thai, คุณ, would come after the possessive marker in Thai, making ของคุณ. This might make more sense when one looks at the other two definitions of ของ. One is “things, goods”, meaning we could look at ของคุณ literally as “things of you” or “thing(s) of John.” The third definition is “to belong, is the property of,” meaning we could look at it as saying “[thing] belonging to you.” I like this the most, because oftentimes there will be an object thrown in there as well, which will come even before our other two words, meaning the word order with such a phrase as “your car” will be exactly opposite from English. It would be, literally “car thing you,” or รถของคุณ.”
This breaks down to รถ (car) ของ (of; belong to) คุณ (you).
Again, we could look at this more clearly as “the car belonging to you.” A good little word that goes a long way in Thai.
(It’s also the first of the words of the day that I’ve already known, but not known how to write/spell. More of these will be showing up).
That turned into a full blown grammar lesson.