Something fun....

I was going through my Thai MSN messenger contacts today, and thought it might be a bit different to translate their thai language tag lines. Here are just three to get on with:

1.)

คิดถึง...ใครสักคน -----> คิดถึง (kid tueng) is perhaps the most over used phrase in thai. But you become immediately endearing to the thais if you say it in the right way. 'Kid tueng' means 'I miss you', but the d is more of a t sound and the tueng is said with a higher ending intonation. The way i say this is to try and imitate the thai girls, and try with the saying the tueng with your tongue slightly raised. ใครสักคน translates to 'someone or 'somebody'. So putting the two together we have i miss someone/somebody

2.)

ไม่อยู่ ไปเรียนค้ะ------> ไม่อยู่ (mai yoo) The first three characters are very important as they mean 'no', and indicate it's said with a flat tone with the ่, if it was ไหม่ then it would mean 'new' and said differently. But as this is a whole new can of worms, i'll go into this in more detail in later posts.

ไม่อยู่ ('mai yoo') literally means 'not here' and adding 'ไปเรียนค้ะ' (pai rien ka= go to learn) we get 'I'm not here, I go learn', which is ugly so I prefer a looser translation of 'I'm not here, I've gone to study '. The ค้ะ' ('Ka') on the end indicates a girl is typing it.

3.)

ห้วหินทริป -------------> nice and easy one. You may have seen ห้วหิน on road signs before, it's Hua Hin a popular place for thais and farang alike, beach town resort a couple of hours from bangkok. You will notice that Thais will incorporate english loan words a lot into the writing and the last part is an example of this (it confused the hell out of me when i was first learning, as i was always looking for Thai vocab words): ทริป = 'Trip'. So simply we have 'Hua Hin trip.'

The H is hardly emphasised, and we get a raised intonation on the 'ua', and the hin part has no emphasis on it and said in a normal flat tone.

that's the first thai language lesson for today, ill try and do some more this week.

If you have any MSN/Yahoo/Skype taglines you want to submit please feel free, and Ill post the ones I feel have the most benefit to learners.