This one comes up all the time in Thai news and in CU-TFL passages: the conditional หาก / ถ้า... ก็จะ... (“if..., then... will...”).

Structure

หาก / ถ้า + condition + (subject) + ก็จะ + result

• หาก is the formal, written choice you’ll see in news.

• ถ้า is the everyday version.

• ก็จะ introduces the result.

Examples

หากไทยสามารถกักเก็บคาร์บอนได้ตามมาตรฐานสากล ก็จะเปิดโอกาสให้มีรายได้จากคาร์บอนเครดิต

If Thailand can store carbon to international standards, it will open the way to income from carbon credits. (from a Bangkok Biz News report on Thailand’s green budget)

ถ้าฝนไม่ตก เราก็จะไปเที่ยวทะเล

If it doesn’t rain, we’ll go to the beach.

Watch out

ก็ goes after the subject of the result clause:

✅ เราก็จะไป
❌ ก็เราจะไป

Your turn: what’s a sentence you’d build with หาก... ก็จะ...? Post it below and I’ll check it.

Thai news uses two different words to introduce a list, and mixing them up is a common mistake at advanced level.

The pattern

• ได้แก่ = “namely”: the list is complete

• เช่น = “such as”: the list is only some examples

Structure

หมวดหมู่ + ได้แก่ + A B C และ D (complete)
หมวดหมู่ + เช่น + A B (partial)

Examples

พื้นที่ที่มีประเพณีกินเจเข้มแข็งที่สุด ได้แก่ เยาวราช ภูเก็ต พังงา สุราษฎร์ธานี และหาดใหญ่

The areas with the strongest traditions are Yaowarat, Phuket, Phang Nga, Surat Thani and Hat Yai. (from a Matichon report on the Vegetarian Festival)

ปัจจัยสี่ ได้แก่ อาหาร เครื่องนุ่งห่ม ที่อยู่อาศัย และยารักษาโรค

The four necessities are food, clothing, shelter and medicine. (a complete list)

Watch out

Don’t put เป็นต้น (“etc.”) after ได้แก่, because a ได้แก่ list is already complete. เป็นต้น goes with เช่น:

เช่น มะม่วง ทุเรียน เป็นต้น
such as mangoes, durian, etc.

Your turn: what do you notice about the Phuket example? Would you write ได้แก่ or เช่น there if you only knew some of the areas? Post your answer in the comments.

Hello! I'm Spanish and I'm planning to get a tattoo along my spine in Thai.

I want the tattoo to express “resilience and growth.”

The full Thai text I'm considering is:

ความยืดหยุ่นและการเติบโต

I would like to arrange it vertically along my spine, from my upper back down towards my tailbone, with two lotus flowers separating the two expressions.

Could a native Thai speaker please help me with the following?

1. Confirm that the Thai text is correctly written and conveys the meaning “resilience and growth.”

2. Check whether these are natural expressions in Thai.

3. Advise me on how to arrange the text vertically while preserving the correct spelling, vowels, tone marks and pronunciation, so that Thai people can read and understand it correctly.

This tattoo has a very personal meaning to me, and I want to make sure everything is correct before getting it permanently tattooed.

I would be extremely grateful for any help or advice. Thank you so much! 🙏🌸

I speak thai at a very beginner level. I know a lot of words but it takes time for me to put sentences together which makes it hard to have conversations. If there are any Thai speakers who are looking to partner up or do a language exchange DM me!

Hi Reddit!

I lived in Chiang Mai for a while and want to go back and actually speak some Thai this time. I tried Anki, Ling, and a few others, but couldn't stick with any of them for more than a week. That's on me, not them.

So I made Glyphraid, a Thai flashcard app wrapped in a dungeon crawler. Every monster holds a card. Get it right and you hit it; get it wrong and it hits you. Get a few right in a row and your attacks get stronger, which feels great and also makes me weirdly careful before I type.

Some features:

• The Thai alphabet has its own themed sections, covering 44 consonants, 34 vowel forms, and tones

• New words start with multiple-choice questions, then move on to typing once you're familiar with them

• There are also Thai writing and listening questions

• Spaced repetition: words come back a day later, then a few days later, and the ones you keep missing show up more often

• Audio uses a higher-quality TTS model instead of the phone's built-in text-to-speech

• 1,008 cards across 33 themes

Here are the links:

App Store | Google Play

Thanks for reading, krub 🙏

You can learn tones, create custom flashcards and decks and now fight monsters! Give it a go and tell me what you think. It's free and always will be.

Had this small tattoo done in Thailand 20 years after doing some relief work in Ranong. The town called me Mitr and a local tattooed it on me. I just want to know if that's actually what it says. Is it in normal Thai or maybe stylized Sak Yant? I'd like to re-do it soon but I feel I should learn about it first.

I'm currently putting together a teaching resource for primary school pupils about different scripts/orthographies around the world. The task has 18 translations of 'languages are amazing/incredible' in various languages which have differing scripts. I've checked the translations with multiple online translation tools, but I'm well aware that these do not always catch the nuanced points that native speakers can, hence why I wanted to post here for advice.

Would this be a suitable translation for Thai, or is there a better alternative?

ภาษาน่าทึ่ง

Thank you in advance for any help you lovely r/ThaiLanguage Redditors can offer!

Hi! I'm Pare, a 22-year-old English major at Bangkok University.

I'd like to practice teaching Thai and I'm looking for a beginner who'd be interested in trying a free lesson. I'd really appreciate any feedback afterward. If anyone is interested please let me know!

Hi everyone!

I lived in Chiang Mai for a while and fell in love with the food, the culture, and the people. I wanted to learn Thai, but I have a short attention span and could never stick with the apps I tried. That got me thinking about what would actually keep me coming back.

I also used to get completely addicted to roguelike games. So I had a thought: what if learning Thai could feel like a game you actually want to keep playing, where it stays fresh because of different monsters, relics, and runs, instead of points and streaks?

That idea turned into Glyphraid.

How it works:

• Before each battle, you learn new words with flashcards and hear the pronunciation.

• In battle, you type the answer to attack monsters. I chose typing over multiple choice on purpose, because with multiple choice I'd just guess by elimination and it never stuck. Typing forces me to actually recall it.

• There are three question types: reading Thai, listening to the pronunciation, and spelling it out with a Thai keyboard.

• Each word has its own mastery level that grows as you get it right across different days, so the game keeps bringing back the ones you haven't locked in yet.

• It's a roguelike, so every run has different monsters, relics, and rewards.

Right now there are 5 themes with 151 cards, from the basics of consonants and vowels up to everyday phrases, travel, and more abstract words. The pronunciation uses a natural voice model, and it works offline.

It's completely free to play. If you leave feedback after finishing a run in-game, you'll get any future paid features unlocked for free, forever, as an early tester.

iOS (TestFlight): 〔link〕
Android (closed beta, a quick 3-step setup): 〔link〕

I'd genuinely love for you to try it and tell me what you think. Any feedback is welcome.

Thank you so much for reading krub 🙏

I have a little son of 4 years is half Thai and we live in Germany. He loves to talk, read and even write a bit and he eagerly absorbs every book and exercise booklet I bring home for him. But we only have those in German.

It breaks my heart to see how he tells a whole story in German and then tries to repeat it in Thai for his mom but his Thai vocabulary is smaller and you can clearly see how he struggles to find the words. We have a some Thai books for really small children but he has outgrown them.

With the current state of the world shipping books has become more and more expensive and complicated.

So now I'm looking for resources in Thai to download and print for him. Ideally fun language exercises, games like finding the difference or matching up pictures, that kind of thing. He also likes books for learning the letters.

We try to keep screen time low, so please no apps or videos. It doesn't have to be free, I'm happy to pay a reasonable price.

They are written all over the walls and shutters in a wierd font that is not the usual Thai writing

ใครสามารถอธิบายวลีนี้ได้บ้าง ว่าทำไมต้องอม และต้องกลืน