The Use Of ไป And มา In Directionality

[Tod Daniels]

While this topic may have been covered before on this forum; I thought I'd "throw this against the wall, and see what sticks".

The use of ไป and มา initially seems to not make sense for a lot of new foreign Thai language learners. Especially so when they are used to show directionality in actions or events taking place in Thai sentence constructs. (I know it thru me for a loop early on, but I could just be a slow learner. ..)

I was at a private Thai language school last nite sitting a free sample class. The first part of the class was devoted to the correct use of the verbs ไป and มา as 'directionality' markers when used with another verb or activity. Actually the teacher did an excellent job of showing when each word is used with a verb and when they are used together with the activity being done between them to show it as recently completed.

The second part of the class about 'time or tense markers' was to refute a current student’s statement the previous week. He said, because there is no tensing of verbs in Thai it was a language which was ‘one dimensional’ and unable to convey the subtleties of English. This evidently riled the teacher a little.

Totally by herself, the teacher researched, typed and printed up hand outs which explained how tense or time marking most definitely DOES work in the Thai language just fine. It’s just not always represented in Thai the exact same way it is in English.

She illustrated thru various Thai sentence constructs just how Thai achieves the similar meaning in English to verb conjugation for tensing of events. Again I thought this was really well presented and the Thai teacher certainly knew her stuff in this regard (then again she made up the sheets too , but still it was of good value!).

While technically it’s true that the verb NEVER alters it's spelling or changes form; that's where the use of those "time & tense markers" come into play. She used words like จะ, คง, ควร, พึ่ง, แล้ว, อยู่, กำลัง, เมื่อ, ก่อน, นาน etc. in various combinations and with different sentence constructs to show how Thai works when tensing events, or actions.

For something NOT printed in the schools textbook, and developed only by a VERY motivated Thai language teacher to provide some clarity to the class, I thought she did an excellent job and so did the students in class. Sadly, as I was just “observing” the class I had to share the hand-out with a currently enrolled student (so didn’t get a copy for my ‘archives’ ), lol.

Anyway, I dunno if other new learners of the Thai language will find it of interest or not. ..