My dismal attempt at speaking Thai.

[Kiwi306]

Well, a brief background first....

A couple of weeks ago I was getting dressed after a shower in the gym locker room area of Quarter Silom. I saw a young, muscular guy opening the door of the sauna a couple of times and looking towards me. I was thinking surely he isn't cruising me, but I was the only one there, so I decided to take my shirt off and I went into the sauna. I started chatting and then my thoughts were validated. Before long it was hand jobs and kissing. Ok, it doesn't match Olddaddy's fabulous and thrilling (and possibly slightly embellished) sexual encounters, but it was daring and fun for me until someone else entered the sauna.

As I was leaving the sauna, I thought I would try out a Thai phrase on him which I had actually learned the day before.  "Khun loor mak khap." I understood that I was telling him that he was very handsome. A few days later I decided to go to Google translate and repeated the same phrase to discover whether I was speaking Thai well enough to get a correct English translation. I then found out that I had told him that he was very greedy. No wonder he gave me a strange look. How that happened I don't know. A Google search showed me that the Thai word for greedy was loph (Google spelling). Maybe I should just stick to basic Thai phrases in the future 

Anyway, the guy in question is a local who is a gym member and he has excellent English.

[a-447]

We all make mistakes.

I once ordered water (nam plao) in a restaurant and was given a bottle of fish sauce (nam pla).

I now just order by number!

[floridarob]

11 hours ago, Kiwi306 said:

Khun loor mak khap

That's my understanding....  “Law” (handsome) has a low tone and is pronounced more like “loor” than “law”.

I usually say to someone I like ....Khun Loor.... a pause and then Nit Noi.....always gets a surprised reaction, They reply "Only Nit Noi ?"  😝

[zoomomancs]

1 hour ago, floridarob said:

That's my understanding....  “Law” (handsome) has a low tone and is pronounced more like “loor” than “law”.

I usually say to someone I like ....Khun Loor.... a pause and then Nit Noi.....always gets a surprised reaction, They reply "Only Nit Noi ?"  😝

Not 'khun lòr mâak mâak' ? New to Thailand I was trying to say 'Dee mâak mâak' (very good) and ended up saying 'Dee marr' (good dog) until a hotel worker put me right.

[hank75]

15 hours ago, Kiwi306 said:

"Khun loor mak khap."

Is correct. It has an open ended sound to it. Greedy has a p/b sound to it rather like “lope” or “lobe” and is close ended. 

in any case I’m sure he would give you the benefit of the doubt! 

3 hours ago, zoomomancs said:

Not 'khun lòr mâak mâak'

this is more commonly used that “khun law mak krap” which I think sounds a bit odd. Most Thais I know of just say “law maaaaakkk” with accompanying expressions of enthusiasm 

[jason1975]

16 hours ago, Kiwi306 said:

A couple of weeks ago I was getting dressed after a shower in the gym locker room area of Quarter Silom. I saw a young, muscular guy opening the door of the sauna a couple of times and looking towards me. I was thinking surely he isn't cruising me, but I was the only one there, so I decided to take my shirt off and I went into the sauna. I started chatting and then my thoughts were validated. Before long it was hand jobs and kissing. Ok, it doesn't match Olddaddy's fabulous and thrilling (and possibly slightly embellished) sexual encounters, but it was daring and fun for me until someone else entered the sauna.

Lucky for you that someone found you attrative and cruised you in sauna. You could have invited him to your hotel room!

I have visited the changing room and sauna of Quarter Silom gym when I stayed at the hotel but I never used the facilities.

There are signs "No Obscenity" inside changing room and sauna.

[floridarob]

1 hour ago, hank75 said:

“law maaaaakkk”

Try adding the nit noi after a pause..... the look of their faces makes me laugh so much, but you have to say it seriously so they're unsure if your joking or not 😝

[vinapu]

Reading all above I know why I don't bother with Thai at all when there . No boy was ever confused when I said " thousand baht " although some modestly protested when I said " your cock big"

[Londoner]

My career as a student of the Thai language ended when I mistakenly   used a colloquial term  for penis in a restaurant when ordering  food. Although the recollection of this event kept both my partner and our taxi-driver in hysterics- dangerously so- all the way from the airport to Pattaya,  I was never allowed to order in Thai again.

[Kiwi306]

7 hours ago, jason1975 said:

Lucky for you that someone found you attrative and cruised you in sauna. You could have invited him to your hotel room!

I have visited the changing room and sauna of Quarter Silom gym when I stayed at the hotel but I never used the facilities.

There are signs "No Obscenity" inside changing room and sauna.

I don't think he found me attractive, but he did say that he liked my chest. And, if the truth be known, I did invite him to my room, but he said he had to get up early in the morning to go to work. Also, I wonder if he thought that as a guy with a gym membership at the hotel it would be inappropriate to go to a guest's room, even though all the male staff seem to be gay, or at least gay friendly. Possibly you were at the Quarter Silom at the same time as me, jason1975.

After our encounter, I recalled that I had seen the same guy obviously cruising another guy on a previous occasion, but with no response. The other guy was probably straight and oblivious to what was going on. But we gays can read this type of behavior like a book.

 

[jason1975]

1 hour ago, Kiwi306 said:

I don't think he found me attractive, but he did say that he liked my chest. And, if the truth be known, I did invite him to my room, but he said he had to get up early in the morning to go to work. Also, I wonder if he thought that as a guy with a gym membership at the hotel it would be inappropriate to go to a guest's room, even though all the male staff seem to be gay, or at least gay friendly. Possibly you were at the Quarter Silom at the same time as me, jason1975.

Yes thinking back I believe we were at Quarter Silom in mid July. But sorry didn't reach out to meet. I was busy with my guy. Hehe.

[Gaybutton]

Part of the problem is when Thai words are written in transliterated English, quite often they are not even close to the way they are pronounced.  I suggest placing the Google Translate app on your phone.  It is free and translates English into Thai - both written and spoken.  The Thai person speaking Thai in the app obviously is pronouncing the words correctly.  You can either learn from that or just let the app do the talking for you.  That app will also do the vice-versa, translating Thai, along with many other languages, into English.  Your friend can speak into the app, and out comes English.

All you have to do is speak into the app and it will translate what you say.  Nearly every time the app translates properly - or at least properly enough that your Thai friend will easily understand what you are trying to say.

If you are going to try to speak Thai, make sure you are getting the tones correct.  Many don't realize how important that is, but it really is.  Make mistakes with the tones and often the Thai person has no idea what you are trying to say.

[floridarob]

31 minutes ago, Gaybutton said:

Make mistakes with the tones and often the Thai person has no idea what you are trying to say.

Same can be said for the other way around....how many times a Thai (or other foreigner, including Aussies/Brits) say something in English and we don't have a clue to what they are saying 😝

[10tazione]

On 8/8/2026 at 8:46 AM, Londoner said:

My career as a student of the Thai language ended when I mistakenly   used a colloquial term  for penis in a restaurant when ordering  food. Although the recollection of this event kept both my partner and our taxi-driver in hysterics- dangerously so- all the way from the airport to Pattaya,  I was never allowed to order in Thai again.

Dont order buffalo meat and dont visit the bridge on the river kwai and you are (almost) safe

[Rent Boy]

The way this is written in Roman letters on Google is pretty useless for most of us.

If I understand correctly, หล่อ (lòo) should be pronounced like similar to "law", but without pronouncing the w.   Also drop to a low tone.   Listen to the attached video or google translate saying "you are very handsome".    Note the change of pitch.

I don't know"greedy" yet, but this definitely has a "p" on the end in the Thai script.

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DUp8c9WAY8b/

English	Thai	Tone
Handsome	หล่อ (lòo)	Low
Greedy	โลภ (lôop)	Falling

[mauRICE]

On 8/9/2026 at 2:50 PM, floridarob said:

Same can be said for the other way around....how many times a Thai (or other foreigner, including Aussies/Brits) say something in English and we don't have a clue to what they are saying 😝

Ooh I've come across so-called native speakers of English like that; the most memorable was this Kiwi guy from the South Island - I didn't have a fucking clue as to what he was saying and was thinking of ways of getting out of the conversation. Guess what he did for a living? Thaaat's right, he was a teacher of English in Thailand. 🤦

[Marc308]

Learning to speak paasaa Thai is a real privilege. It means that Thailand is willing to share a bit of its culture with us. Of course, it is not absolutely necessary you learn to speak Thai. One could theoretically live in the UK or Canada without speaking English, but you would be strongly disadvantaged. You'd necessarily be ghettoized to live in a community which speaks your language instead of being able to roam freely. I suppose, thanks to AI, in the not too distant future we will have devices which go far beyond what Google Translate can do. I would find that eventuality somewhat sad, because so much of culture is wrapped up into language. I hope Thailand doesn't become Anglicized one day after all the centuries which Thailand has mostly successfully resisted colonization.

[a-447]

13 hours ago, mauRICE said:

Ooh I've come across so-called native speakers of English like that; the most memorable was this Kiwi guy from the South Island - I didn't have a fucking clue as to what he was saying and was thinking of ways of getting out of the conversation. Guess what he did for a living? Thaaat's right, he was a teacher of English in Thailand. 🤦

I meet a German guy at an embassy Christmas party. He was an Australian citizen but spike English with a very strong German accent. He was an English teacher at a Tokyo University!

I also met a Scottish guy who was employed as an English teacher but I had a lot of difficulty understanding anything he said!

In Japan in those days- maybe it's still the same- if you were a foreigner it was assumed you spoke English as your native language.

I also ran into an American guy in his 60s who had been living in Tokyo for over 30 years, yet he could hardly order a cup of coffee in Japanese. I asked him how he's managed without the language and he said he bought his daily necessities at supermarkets and went to an American doctor in Harajuku. And he only associated with fellow foreigners.

What a waste!

I did a bit of Japanese language conversation tutoring for students taking the University entrance exam. One of the students spoke Japanese with a very distinct French accent!

I met her teacher outside the exam room and we had a very nice conversation - in French and English. When I asked him why he didn't teach French, he replied in broken English that French was too beautiful a language to be destroyed by Australian students! 

Yet he was happy to destroy the English language!

 

[bkkmfj2648]

1 hour ago, a-447 said:

I met her teacher outside the exam room and we had a very nice conversation - in French and English. When I asked him why he didn't teach French, he replied in broken English that French was too beautiful a language to be destroyed by Australian students! 

That made me laugh.

When I was living in Italy and I decided that it was time for me to seriously learn Italian - I got to know the Italian teacher and I asked her, which foreigners are the most difficult to teach Italian to.  She replied:

• Americans because they don't remember their grammar structure rules,
• Japanese because there is no connection for them to any of the latin language sets.

As an American - her analysis was totally correct.  I did not remember the grammar structure rule set for English - it was all remembered by rote brute force.  So, the only way that I could successfully learn Italian was to re-learn the English conjugation rule set for "simple tenses", "compound tenses", and "phrases bound by time anchors".  I remember buying the Italian verb conjugation book:

Where each verb is conjugated into its individual tenses.  As my brain tends to work in a matrix format - I just had to learn these Italian verbs and remember in which row and column was the correct verb tense that I needed.  I also revisited this verb tense usage in the same matrix format for English and then that was the key to my success when I needed to conjugate a verb.  My brain would remember in which row/column the verb tense that I would need to use and just pick it up from what I remembered in the 501 verb conjugation tense list.  After many years of living in Italy - I eventually overcame this conjugation handicap where I could conjugate the verbs automatically - because what you discover when you live in a new host country is that all of the conjugations are rarely used and a popular much smaller subset is used in everyday language.  

[ichigo]

2 hours ago, a-447 said:

I also ran into an American guy in his 60s who had been living in Tokyo for over 30 years, yet he could hardly order a cup of coffee in Japanese. I asked him how he's managed without the language and he said he bought his daily necessities at supermarkets and went to an American doctor in Harajuku. And he only associated with fellow foreigners.

What a waste!

I agree. I'm sure everyone has their reasons, but for myself, I couldn't imagine relocating to another country and not learning the language. If I end up moving to Thailand (or other) one day, I would absolutely invest the time in learning the language, even if English is widely spoken.