Top 500 Thai Words You Must Know ...

[desi]

I keep reading that in order to get by in Thai you need at least 500 words. But, what are they?

I googled and found The 500 Most Commonly Used Words in the English Language but I doubt they are going to be the same as in Thai.

Does anyone know what they are? Also, what are the top 2000 Thai words one should learn?

I figured if I had a definite number to aim for, I could whittle away at it daily / weekly / monthly.

Edited May 27, 2008 by desi

[riga]

See if this thread is helpfull

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?sh...p;hl=1000+words

[desi]

See if this thread is helpfull

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?sh...p;hl=1000+words

Thanks riga.

I've downloaded it and ... since I have to create flash cards anyway, no biggie to gather in the English equivalent.

(painful maybe, but no biggie ;-)

[riga]

See if this thread is helpfull

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?sh...p;hl=1000+words

Thanks riga.

I've downloaded it and ... since I have to create flash cards anyway, no biggie to gather in the English equivalent.

(painful maybe, but no biggie ;-)

I hope we will see some of those flash cards one day

[desi]

I hope we will see some of those flash cards one day

It's a possibility :-)

And it's not too bad actually. I can watch tv while checking each out at thai2english.com ...

I just need to decide which of the resources to depend upon. Haas - Links - Orchid - Tax ... as I'm not sure who they are.

[Rikker]

"Haas" is derived from Mary Haas' work (though I can't say precisely which materials are used)

"Links" is from NECTEC, but again I'm not sure of the range of materials used

"Orchid" is another NECTEC project, a part-of-speech tagged corpus

"Tax" I understand to be a corpus of tax-related documents (useful for looking at what are the most common words in academic/formal writing, but there's lots of tax specific jargon that almost no one will need)

It demonstrates that you'll get different lists depending on "who" you ask, so don't take any one as the gospel truth. Also, they were generated automatically, so you'll see irrelevant things like numerals that should be weeded out.

[desi]

"Haas" is derived from Mary Haas' work (though I can't say precisely which materials are used)

"Links" is from NECTEC, but again I'm not sure of the range of materials used

"Orchid" is another NECTEC project, a part-of-speech tagged corpus

"Tax" I understand to be a corpus of tax-related documents (useful for looking at what are the most common words in academic/formal writing, but there's lots of tax specific jargon that almost no one will need)

It demonstrates that you'll get different lists depending on "who" you ask, so don't take any one as the gospel truth. Also, they were generated automatically, so you'll see irrelevant things like numerals that should be weeded out.

Thanks Rikker. It's been interesting going through the list to see what on it. Most of the words I know are combos I find by scrolling down on www.thai2english.com.

[desi]

Well, after checking it out a bit, I've decided the words on that list are not useful to me at this stage.

Except for months, days of the week and numbers, I learn faster (and easier) if they are in a logical word group.

For instance, pood len (joking, kidding) instead of len (play) on its own.

So back to the drawing board ...