Hey folks.  Sorry its been a while.  I was hanging out in Korea and Japan for a bit so I haven’t had much time to post.

I have exams this week, but I need a quick break in my studying so I’ll give a bit of fairly useful stuff in this post.

I haven’t said any of this stuff since I’ve been back, but while I was in Japan I came to a number of realizations of problems I had with Thai when I was at the level where I pretty much knew how to say everything I thought I knew, but I couldn’t put it all together.   Now I find myself at a similar place in a couple of other languages and when I have some time I hope to make a few good posts on how to make that transition from short sentences and lots of frustration in to fluid speech.

Anwyays, today I wanna briefly talk about how to ‘see’ stuff in Thai.

Stuff like the following:

• I can’t see it.
• I can’t make it out.
• I can’t see it clearly.
• Get the hell outta the way!  I can’t see the screen.

Pretty much any phrase similar to the above makes use of the word มอง which if is usually defined as ‘to stare.’  While this is correct in some instances, when combinded with its partner word ‘เห็็น’ it can mean something much more useful.

The easisest phrase and the one that popped into my head as possibly being common enough to make it into my 100-sentence project to get outta this is มองไม่เห็น .

So if we start with the base form of that…

มองเห็น

we can pull up a few easy and useful phrases….

• มองเห็นมั้ย  – Can you see (something)?     the tv; what I’m pointing at; the board; etc…
• มองไม่เห็น  –   “I can’t see < (something)  because of an obstruction>”
• มองเห็นแต่ไม่ชัด – I can see it, but not clearly.

Start with those.  It may not seem like much, but at the very least, put มองไม่เห็น into your SRS.  Its one of those things you find yourself saying a couple times a week and thats frequent enough to throw into your deck.