T. F. Rhoden - Outrageous Thai: Slang, Curses and Epithets (Thai Phrasebook)

APPENDIX
English - Thai Word List

CHAPTER ONE
Slang Basics

Congratulations on your new purchase and welcome to the exciting world of real, spoken Thai. Throughout the book youll encounter a side of Thai society that is often not privy to the outsider. Some of it will be fun, some of it will be harsh, but all of it will have a degree of honesty often not welcomed by your Thai friends and colleagues. Why do they call this land The Land of Smiles? And whats really behind all those smiles anyway? Well, by the end of this book you should have a better idea, and probably more useful a better way to express those ideas.

But, before we jump into subjects like Sex, Cursing, Booze, Status and the like we need to review some of what I call Slang Basics. This includes words like gonna , wanna or the overuse of the words like or just in English. If we dont learn them in Thai, then you may end up sounding even more like a fool than if you were never to learn any of these words or phrases to begin with. Compare the two English sentences below:

I find her highly disagreeable. I shall not be attending her after-dinner event. Please tell her I have a previous engagement, or something to that effect.

vs.

Ughhh! Shes such a bitch. I aint gonna go to her stupid party. Just tell her I got shit to do, or whatever....

I hope that I dont need to explain the differences between these two sentences. In effect, they both get across the same idea, but the second one sounds like something you might say if you were talking to a friend. Its colloquial, idiomatic, and slangy. Think of the second sentence as our overarching goal for this entire book. This book wasnt written for your development as an eloquent speech writerit was made to help you not sound like a dipshit in Thai!

Me, Yah and the Rest

Thai is a wonderful language for pronouns. Depending on which pronoun you use for I, you or he/she/it , the entire meaning of a sentence can change. Something rather mundane can immediately become a little more hip. After a while though, you should start to realize that for most of the conversations youll encounter on a daily basis, Thais forego using pronouns altogether. Leaving out words like I, you or he/she/it and the rest will make your Thai just sound more authentic. This will give extra effect to those pronouns that you do decide to use. First, for guys or girls, stop referring to yourself in the first person as [ phm ] or [ dh-chn ], respectively, and start using the more laidback [ rao ] instead. See below: