Continuing with our analysis of the word ได้ that I wrote about last week, I wanted to finish up the discussion of this utility word by providing you with some useful phrases that use ได้. This isn’t an exhaustive list, and some further study of the word and its uses is certainly required. For now, however, these two posts should give you (and me) plenty of data to work with.

I suggest that you create some example sentences and see how you can incorporate ได้ into your vocabulary. There are a lot, as we’ve seen, but with practice and repetition you will get it.

Here are other uses to get you on your way:

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On a friend’s recommendation I picked up the book Bangkok 8 by author John Burdett. Set in Thailand, this murder mystery/thriller novel follows police detective and not-quite-ex-Buddhist monk Sonchai Jitpleecheep and his partner, Pichai, on a case to involving a U.S. Marine in Bangkok. They are just a little late in catching up to him, however, when he is found dead, being suffocated and poisoned by a car-full of snakes!

It might sound a bit far-fetched on the surface, but once you start reading you realize that it’s completely plausible in Burdett’s world and you absolutely will not be able to put the book down! With twists and turns at every corner, there is never a moment where you feel like you have the story figured out and have to drudge through the rest just to say you finished it. Nope… Burdett’s brilliant writing keeps you on your toes and wanting more.

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Glenn Slayden (of thai-language.com) and I collaborated on an online typing tutor program/game that is designed to help assist you in learning the keyboard mapping of Thai characters on an English keyboard. I originally designed this game to not only help me learn to type Thai, but I also wanted a fun project to work on that involved only HTML and the jQuery javascript library. (Work programming can be boring when you have to do it; I wanted to program something that interested me and will help others, too.)

If you remember the old Space Invaders video game from 1978 then you have a pretty good idea of how the tutor works. Consonants and vowels drop from the top of the screen, and you have until the bottom of the screen to correctly type the answer. Your score is marked on the right, as well as some filters Glenn put in to help you concentrate on specific things. You can start, pause, and restart the game as you like.

You can play the game on thai-language.com, and sometime in 2010 I will be releasing another online Thai learning game (again on TLC or perhaps here on this blog).

Good luck!

I thought I would do something a little bit different in this post. There are plenty of resources and blog posts out there explaining what สงกรานต์ (Songkran – “Thai New Year”) is, so I won’t spend the time reinventing the wheel. Instead, I decided to post a photo gallery of pictures I took at our วัด (wat  – “temple”) during our Songkran celebration this past weekend in Pennsylvania. Enjoy!


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There are many “utility” words in Thai; words that mean several different things and serve multiple grammatical functions depending on how they are used.

I thought it would be a good idea to slowly go through some of these words to give you a better understanding of how they work, especially since they are very heavily used in both spoken and written Thai.

The first word I want to start with is one I touched upon in my last post – Sentence Structure Matters  (to a point). The word is ได้ (dâi – “can”), and as you will see has a few ways it’s used.

Shall we get started?
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Mary Haas - Thai Language Author

When I first started learning Thai, one of the comments I consistently received from people – native speakers and farang alike – was that sentence structure didn’t matter all that much, as the person you were speaking to would get the gist of what you were saying based on the context.

The more I dig into the Thai language, however, I think this statement may have more to do with the Thai’s ไม่เป็นไร culture than us actually having to not worry about sentence structure and grammatical rules. I love the fact that Thai people are very casual about this, as it does certainly take some pressure and anxiety out of having to actually speak Thai to a real person. But, it can also be something of a detriment to serious students.

Rules are certainly made to be broken, but before you can break the rules you have to know the rules.

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