Andys Real Guide to Thailand

"When you come to Thailand before?"

Meaning: When did you last visit Thailand ?

If you intend to learn the language seriously you will need to learn Thai script - No "if, buts, or maybes". Your pronunciation will never progress beyond the mediocre unless you learn the script because there is no other way accurate way of representing the tonal aspects of the language, which you will quickly learn is a key component of the language.

A small collection of possibly useful words

Some (very) Basic phrases.
Many phrases change with the gender of the person speaking.
Below (m) indicates the phrase for Males, and (f) that for Females.

Transliteration

A continuing problem is that of transliteration - where Thai words are re-written in Latin script for the benefit of Farang. There is an official standard for doing this, but still you may see the same place name written differently. For example "Jomtien", and "Chomtien" refer to the beach just south of Pattaya, itself sometimes written "Phattaya"..  In general you need to pronounce transliterated words they way they are written and remember that hard consonant sounds ( 'D', 'B', 'T', etc ) don't exist in Thai. Do bear in mind that no transliteration system will ever allow you to accurately pronounce Thai words with 100% accuracy.

It may help you to know that the Thai name for their capital city is not Bangkok, but "Krung Thep".

One other point about placenames, many tourist guidebooks still refer to Khorat (famous for it's cats), and omit to mention that this city is known as Nakhon Ratchisima in Thailand. Asking for a ticket to Khorat will just get you a blank look.

Written Language

The written Thai language consists of 44 consonants and 18 vowels, and the few punctuation marks that exist are rarely used day-to-day. Now if 62 sounds like a lot, I'd point out that English uses 52 glyphs without counting the numerous punctuation marks. Note also that English has the smallest character count of all the European languages.

One easy mistake to make, especially if you are familar with another European language is interpreting the marks above Thai characters as diacritics - they're not. Many of these marks are true characters - often vowels. As such they're a critical part of the language

Written Thai doesn't put spaces between words. Spaces are instead found where European languages would use a full stop or possibly a comma. There are a couple of rules which help identify individual words, such as no word begins with a vowel, but mostly it's down to practice and recognition.

The text below was taken from another page on this website. 
The full list of Thai characters, along with their names can be viewed on Thai chart page on the Unicode web site

Here's a site that offers automatic English to Thai translation of text. In my experience most Thais find the output of this quite comprehensible, though they often give a little laugh at some of the mistakes. Best tip is to keep your English simple and grammatically correct. Above all avoid the use of English colloquisms and slang - these are often very badly translated.

Bit of Techie speak;
Written Thai is a compositive language written left to right, top to bottom. On the web it is represented by the charset TIS-620, and within Unicode as the range 0E00-0E7F. It is also specified in the standards ISO8859-11 and Cp874 (IBM Thai)

Numbers

Vocalising numbers in Thai is considerably more logical than most European languages. One important difference is that whereas in English we start repeating the multipliers after 1000 (e.g. 23,000 = "twenty-three thousand"), in Thai there are different words for 10,000, 100,000, and 1,000,000.  

Technical note:
There are dialects of Thai, the main one being that spoken in the central region - roughly Bangkok and environs. The dialects seem to vary their use of certain words, the core of the language being the same in all regions. Laos speaks a language largely comprehendable to Thais from the Isan region of Thailand ( North-East ) , and Laos script is very similar, though not identical. Burmese, Cambodian and Malay are completely different languages.

Mercifully, Thai numerals are not in widespread use and generally only used in temples, for government documents and literature relating to the monarchy

More about Thai numerals

Emerald Buddha in Chang Rai, Northern Thailand.