ต เต่า กับ ร เรือ

27 July 2015, TV = 1172.6 hours

AUA: total class time = 2189 hours; taking reading/writing level 2

advanced class = 1202 hours; reading/writing classes = 49 hours

Chinese Thai

21 November 2014, TV = 1008.5 hours

Wife number three throwing a fit in Thai with a pretty heavy Chinese accent — in contrast, her servant sounds thoroughly Thai to me; from a scene in episode one of มงกุฎดอกส้ม mong kut dawk som, a lakorn about an ethnically Chinese Thai family:

“Lift”ed From The English

7 November 2014, TV = 936.5 hours

Sign from within the Bangkok BTS skytrain system.

More กขฃ: Fun ‘N’ Games With พยัญชนะ — And สระไทย Too

23 October 2014, TV =  897.5 hours

Screenshot of the Thai vowel game from กอไก่ (ก-ฮ)(สระไทย) ฝึกอ่านไทย APP

When I started to more actively familiarize myself with the Thai writing system a few months ago, I spent some time on dekgeng.com, and found it helpful for learning the Thai letters¹, particularly the game that has you match letters’ written forms with their spoken names, and the chart that lets you click on a letter to hear its line from the เอ๋ย กอไก่ poem/song.²

กขฃ — Music (etc) Videos

14 September 2014, TV = 847.7 hours

I’ve been trying to get more familiar with the Thai “alphabet” lately.¹ Partly this is a matter of looking more carefully at the characters, but mostly it’s a matter of getting to know their names and the sounds they represent.

There are a lot of resources online

Woeful Transliteration #3

24 August 2014, TV = 843.8 hours

Not what you might be thinking….

I see a lot of this in Bangkok — it’s all over the place.

More Poo Than I Ever Knew: A Failure To Differentiate

8 August 2014, TV = 841.6 hours

I’ve updated the previous post with some corrections and an explanatory note, after a reader pointed out that I’d mistakenly used the same word for both ชมพู่

Woeful Transliteration #2: A Tale Of Two Poos

5 August 2014, TV = 840.5 hours

[Note: I’ve  added strikethrough corrections and comments in square brackets to address a mistake I’d made, see footnote 2 below for the full explanation].

Well, I don’t think this is civet coffee (which anyway I’ve no desire to try).

From my perspective as an English-speaker, however,  there’s even worse:

Woeful Transliteration #1

1 August 2014, TV = 839.2 hours

Umm…I think I’ll stick with the traditional Thai massage, thanks.

Still Thinking About Learning To Read

13 June 2014, TV = 783.8 hours

Attempting a little self-evaluation a few posts back, I talked about my comprehension of spoken Thai, as well as my very limited ability to read – or maybe more accurately, to pick out a few words here and there.

A commenter named Jon wrote:

“Why don’t u write ur blog in Thai? Or at least some of it? This is how I got really good at Thai. Writing is such an essential part of a language learner s journey to fluency. Studying at AUA will never make u fluent. . . unless ur extremely gifted in picking up languages.