Now that the new football/soccer season has started, I thought it might be a good and relatively painless opportunity to improve our Thai.

Listening:

If your going to watch the game anyway, you might as well use the Thai commentary rather than the English. Let's face it, the English commentary is often obvious and cliche-ridden anyway, and while I doubt the Thai is any better, at least it provides challanging listening practice. Thais tend to be qute focal when watching, so provide their own, less polite, commentary as well!

Reading:

Can anybody recommend any Thai websites that publish match reports? I think it'd be good reading practice as you'd already have a good idea of the content before even starting reading, making it more accessable than most native-Thai websites (if you didn't see the game you can see short reports at the BBC Football website).

Speaking:

Anyone who's spent even a little time here will know how popular football, so there should never be a shortage of interested people to strike up a conversation with.

Writing:

If anyone knows of a good Thai football forum, please let me know. It'd be good reading practice as well.

To elp everyone out I thought it might be a good idea to gather a collection of common and high-frequency words and phrases. Although football related, most can be used in other contexts too, so will be useful in other situations.

Ok, I'll get the ball rolling with my rather pathetic collection of vocab. Please add your own. Hopefully we can keep adding new words and phrases as the season progresses. I think the best way of learning (and retaining) new language is to be using it as part of your everyday life, in contexts that are personally interesting or essential for you.

Note regarding transilteration:

Please write in Thai with English translations. Wether you want to add transliterations or not is up to you. Every person I've met who's learning Thai, and doesn't know the Thai alphabet, seems to have their own different way of writing Thai in Latin letters. I think the best way for those who can't read Thai is to get someone read the Thai out loud for you and then write you own transilteration. Even better would be to learn the Thai alphabet. It's very tricky, but then some things are worth doing precisely because they are difficult. Think of it as code cracking or something. Ok, lecture over.

I'll write the Thai in a bigger font as it can be a bit difficult to see otherwise.

Vocabulary

ยิง to shoot (at goal)

ชนะ to win, to beat

แพ้ to lose

เรียบร้อย used to mean nice, beautiful (usually used in response to a clean hit shot, or nice passing move)

เจอ to meet, to play

กรรมการ referee

Example sentences:

Spurs won Spursชนะ

Spurs beat Arsenal SpursชนะArsenal

Who are Spurs playing today? วันนี้Spursเจอใคร (today -วันนี้ , who - ใคร)

Spurs are playing Arsenal today วันนี้SpursเจอArsenal

Arsenal lost 5-1 Arsenalแพ้5-1

Arsenal lost Arsenalแพ้

Arsenal lost to Spurs Asrenalแพ้Spurs

the referee's blind กรรมการตาบอด (blind - ตาบอด)

Feel free to correct these if wrong. As I said, it's a rather pathetic collection at the moment, but by the end of the season, if we work together, who knows.

Sorry, I had the Thai and English neatly spaced apart when I composed the post, but it seems to have been automatically squashed together.

Aw come on man! (just kidding)

You could start by going through this other thread and picking out stuff to add to your collection and then go from there.

There are most likely some more football threads also, but I didn't look past this one,

I did a post about football vocab at my

blog during the world cup, which might be an appropriate place to start for some. Then there was this thread on TV.

While the Thai footy season has been going on I have been following TPL and Muangthong Utd on twitter which provides short (if irregular) snippets of reading practice ( @thailandpl and @muangthongutd respectively). Is there a Thai language twitter feed on the EPL that any one knows about?

Can anybody recommend any Thai websites that publish match reports?

You can go to www.siamsport.com .

If anyone knows of a good Thai football forum, please let me know. It'd be good reading practice as well.

I recommend supachalasai at pantip.com. Here is the link.