LonelyAmerican

I posted some detailed information about character encodings at http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=64767. It explains how you can convert those garbled messages into nice readable Thai.

For Yqq and CSS's posts, the Thai symbols are unreadable, but for LonelyAmerican's the Thai symbols are clear.

Can anyone tell me why? Occasionally I encounter Thai script I cannot read even though I have enabled Thai on my Windows and download many fonts. Am I missing a certain kind of font perhaps? If so, please tell me where i can get the font Yqq and CSS used.

Cheers!

To read Thai messages:

Any browser or email program will have a Character Encoding menu item under the View menu. If you can't read something that you believe was written in Thai, go to the View - Character Encoding menu and select TIS-620. If that doesn't work, then try UTF-8. If neither of those work, then try ISO-8859-11 or Windows-874. If none of these work, then the message was probably not written in Thai.

To create Thai messages (without a Thai keyboard):

Go to http://www.atm.ox.ac.uk/user/iwi/charmap.html, select "0E: Thai, Lao" from the selection box, and begin clicking on Thai letters.

Here is some more detailed information for those who are interested.

There are several character encodings that support Thai. I have my system set to use UTF-8 by default. UTF-8 includes characters for dozens of languages, including Thai. For those of you located in Thailand, your computer is likely using TIS-620 (Thai Industry Standard character encoding) by default. TIS-620 only includes Thai and western characters, what you would see on a standard Thai keyboard. There is also ISO-8859-11 and Microsoft's Windows-874 encoding for the Thai language, both of which are almost identical to TIS-620. UTF-8 and TIS-620 are by far the most common encodings for the Thai language. When I receive emails from Thailand, my friends' computers all use TIS-620, but my system uses UTF-8, so I always have to change the encoding so that I can read their messages. This is perfectly normal.

Briefly, the reason there are multiple character encodings for the same language is because there are hundreds (maybe even a few thousand) languages in the world and many have their own scripts. Chinese alone has about 10,000 different possible characters. In order to send data around via email or the web and represent all of those characters, each character would have to be represented with 8 or 10 bytes instead of 1 to 4 bytes. In order to control the amount of data being sent around, we use character encodings, each of which includes a specific set of languages.

If you are technically minded and still want to learn more about character encodings, http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html#h-5.2 is a good place to start.

I thought this would be a good topic for one of the permanent pinned topics. Although I can't think of many at the moment, ไม่เป็นไร is a great example because if you look up those words in a dictionary, it translates to "not be what", which doesn't make a whole lot of sense and the phrase has a much deeper meaning than that. Most people are familiar with that one and have a pretty good idea of what it means, but there have been other idioms I have heard, or received in Thai emails, that I simply could not understand, where the words seem to have nothing to do with the actual intended meaning. It is one of the biggest barriers for me to understand everyday spoken Thai. I thought it would be a great idea to have a running list of Thai idioms and what they mean. I have a few examples of English idioms that would certainly confuse any non-English speaking person, and any of us would admit that we have heard Thai idioms that we just didn't understand.

Some English examples of idioms are:

take it with a grain of salt

odds and ends

jump the gun

barking up the wrong tree

burning your bridges

bury the hatchet

every dog has his day

Here are a couple of other ways you might improve your Thai vocabulary and grammar. Reading Thai wikipedia articles can be interesting, and often include words and phrases that aren't in dictionaries. Also, books that are written for Thai people to learn English can actually help you learn Thai. There are lots of them at all levels, from beginner to very advanced. The best way to improve your speaking and listening is having conversations with Thai people. It takes a long time to get used to the tones. I have learned so much and put so much time into it and I am not even close to feeling fluent.

You might be thinking of the word ณ (one of the only 2 one-letter Thai words I know of). It is also pronounced na, but is a different word than นะ. When Thai words are written with western letters, it is difficult to tell what is really meant.

Na ...means "at"......eg ....Rinrada Na Krungthrep......Na Chiang Mai......etc....

The tone mark is essential, especially for the word "mai". The tone determines the meaning of the word. Here are 8 examples of the same pronunciation.

ไหม (short, rising) = particle for a question "or not?"

ไมล์ (long, mid) = mile

ไม่ (short, falling) = no, not

ใหม่ (short, low) = new

ไหม้ (short, falling) = burn

ไม้ (long, high) = wood, wooden

ม่าย (long, falling) = overlook, widow, divorced

หมาย (long, rising) = summons

As far as I know, any ambiguities in tone and vowel length can only be resolved by the context of the sentence.

Kao is another interesting articulation.

เค้า (short, high) = clue

เขา (short, rising) = horn

เข้า (short, falling) = enter

เข่า (short, low) = knee

ขาว (long, rising) = white

คาว (long, mid) = stench

ข้าว (long, falling) = rice

ข่าว (long, low) = news

First, we're actually looking at a couple words pronounced "mai" with different tones here.

Are these words (phrases) that would appear in a dictionary? I have a couple of dictionaries, one Se-Ed that I use a lot and contains many impolite and profane words, and I don't see ติงตีอง or ตบสลบไสล in there. ติง is there, but not ต๊อง, nor ตีอง. ตบ and สลบ are there, but not ไสล (unless it is supposed to be สลาย). In general, I try to avoid impolite Thai phrases, but they are good to know so that you know what people might be saying about you. Some Thais think they can make derogatory comments about farang right in front of them, so it is nice to recognize the words that you never learn in classes or books.

Depending on what English speaking country you come from, นะ probably has an equivalent in your culture. Here in the US, people will often make a statement and then say "huh", kind of hinting that the listener should probably agree with the statement, but not really expecting an answer. In Canada, people often put an "eh" on the end of their sentences. Not sure about Britain or Australia.

Hi,

When i emailed my Thai friend to tell her i'm coming, she said "I'll plan for us na"..."See you soon na"

What does "na" means in Thai?

I taught English a few times and hated it. You will almost certainly be teaching kids, and they are likely to be kids of rich Thais who want their kids to learn English, but most of the kids have no interest in learning English and you do a lot more babysitting. Finding freelance teaching work teaching adults is much more rewarding. A lot of people do it part time, and while it is not exactly legal to work freelance for cash under the table, few people ever get in trouble for it.

I seriously looked into starting my own business too. I had Thai friends who wanted to be my partners, people I really knew and trusted, and who already owned other businesses and knew how to do it. We thought about opening an Internet cafe near Bang Na where there is likely to be development and tourists because of the new airport. We looked at the costs and potential return, and I just could not see it making sense for me. So much work and investment and in the best case I would still barely have been able to survive on the income living on my own over there, and any small business will have so much competition that you might lose your entire investment. As much as I loved living there, I decided my best option was to return to the US and make money back here, visit Thailand when I can, and think about rental properties back here in the US so that I could go over and be a perpetual tourist, and then try to retire over there someday, or get my own web based business and run it from Thailand. There aren't any easy options for living over there.

Why not just teach English ?

I know farangs who teach part time tutoring and pull in 20K/month

Full time teachers make more than twice that in good schools.

Not much risk either as there is large demand for white faces

to teach English here. Plenty of jobs.

Just a thought .....

That was my initial plan, Id even picked a course and it included a 1 year visa. But there were changes which meant you couldnt get a job without a work permit, and work permits arent issued to part timers. I think they also want you to have a degree now, which I havent got.

I have never found a web site that has very good deals. A lot of hotels all around the country can not be found on web sites, and some of them are very nice hotels. If you are going there for the first time and want a reservation, I would suggest finding a decent hotel on the Internet in the area where you want to stay and reserve a room for a few nights. Verify with the front desk that you can extend your reservation if you need to, but you are likely to find a hotel that you like better, and less expensive, just by walking around.

Hi all !

Where can I bok the hotels in Bangkok for the best price ??There its so many webbsites, and I really dont know !