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How to Say I Miss You in Thai

November 14, 2020 by

Today we’re going to learn how to say “I miss you” in Thai.  While this is the perfect phrase to show that special someone that you’re thinking of them, it’s also used to say that you miss your family, friends, places and times of your life. 

miss you in Thai

คิดถึงจัง

I Miss You in Thai

The main Thai phrase for “I miss you” is คิดถึง (kít tĕung).

The phrase คิดถึง (kít tĕung) literally translates as something like “thinking of you” or “(my) thoughts reach (you)” however it’s used just like we use “I miss you” in English.  

Thai Grammar Note:

Thai is a very contextual language which means we will very often drop any information that is already understood by both speaker and listener.  The most common example of this is dropping the pronouns as in “I miss you.”  We really only need to say the “miss” part.  If I say คิดถึง (kít tĕung)  to you, everybody involved or in earshot knows who misses who.

How to Say I REALLY Miss You in Thai

You can use any of these phrases to when you want to tell someone you miss them a lot.

In case you really want to impress your significant other, use this one.  Be warned that the person you use this on may very well swoon.

I Miss You NA นะ (NA: The Special Softener Particle)

Thai language has a lot of very short words called “particles.”  Particle words often don’t have a a meaning like most words.  Rather they add a bit of emotional color to the sentence that they are modifying.  In non-tonal languages, we do this with intonation.  NA นะ is one of the most common particle words that you will encounter in Thai.

I call it “the softener” because it makes whatever you are saying sound softer/nicer/more pleasant.  The extent of this “softness” is contextual.  So if people in a relationship say it to each other, or someone says it to a small child, it can have a cute feeling to it.

คิดถึง vs คิดถึงนะ – Both of these phrases mean “I miss you,” but the na adds a pinch of niceness.

More Formal/Polite Ways to Say I Miss You in Thai

The main word for you in Thai is คุณ (khun), but it is not used in Thai like we us “you” in English.  The Thai คุณ (khun) has a very formal feel to it which is similar to “mr.” or “mrs.” so we don’t recommend using it very much.  However, you will come across it in texts and in Thai dramas where the dialogue tends to be unrealistically polite so we’ll give you some examples.

It would sound nice on a card, but it would sound a little silly if you said to someone.  Because, generally, if you are close to someone, you would never call them คุณ (khun) – “you.”

More Useful Thai Phrases Related to “I Miss You”

Learn to Speak and Read Thai

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How to Say Good Morning in Thai

October 5, 2020 by

“Good morning” greetings work differently in Thai. Most cultures say different things at different times of day. But Thai people don’t really use “good morning” phrases.

You might hear them in Thai movies or TV shows. But if you want to know how Thai people REALLY greet each other in the morning, keep reading.

**The best phrases are at the end!**

good morning in thai

How to Say Good Morning in Thai

Textbook Thai (Don’t Use These!)

⚠️ Warning: These Sound Weird!

Thai textbooks teach these phrases. But real Thai people don’t say them. You’ll get strange looks!

= Good morning (too fancy)
= Good morning (sounds like a robot)

😄 Fun Fact

If you say อรุณสวัสดิ์, Thai people will laugh! It’s like speaking Shakespeare in English. Too fancy for daily life.

What Thai People Actually Say (Polite)

1

Standard Hello

สวัสดี + ครับ[/speech] (Male)
OR สวัสดี+ ค่ะ (Female)
(sawat-dee khrap/kha)
= Hello
When to use: Any time of day. Works with everyone. Safe choice.
2

Polite Food Question

(taan khaao rue yang?)
= Have you eaten yet?
When to use: With older people, customers, or formal situations.

📝 Quick Note

ทาน (taan) is the polite word for “eat.” กิน (gin) is the casual word. Restaurant staff use ทาน with customers.

What Thai People Actually Say (Casual)

1

Casual Hi

หวัดดีครับ (not found)
/
หวัดดีค่ะ (not found)
(wat-dee khrap/kha)
= Hi
When to use: With friends and family. More relaxed.
2

Casual Food Question

(gin khaao rue yang?)
= Have you eaten yet?
When to use: With friends. Shows you care about them.

🍽️ Why Food Questions?

“Have you eaten yet?” is the #1 Thai greeting! It shows care. Thai people use this more than any “good morning” phrase. Learn more in our “How to Say How Are You in Thai” guide.

Simple Summary

🌅 What to Say in the Morning

✅ USE THESE:
• สวัสดี (sawat-dee) = Hello
• กินข้าวรึยัง (gin khaao rue yang?) = Have you eaten?
❌ DON’T USE:
• อรุณสวัสดิ์ = Too fancy
• สวัสดีตอนเช้า = Sounds weird

More Thai Greetings to Learn

Now you know morning greetings! Learn more Thai greetings:

Final Thoughts

Thai people don’t say “good morning” like we do in English. Use **สวัสดี** (hello) and **กินข้าวรึยัง** (have you eaten?) instead. These sound natural and Thai people use them every day.

Want to learn more Thai? Check out my online course here or get free lessons below.


Filed Under: Beginner, Learn Thai, Learn Thai Online, learn to read thai, Sentences, Where to start? Tagged With:

How to Say I Love You in Thai

March 8, 2019 by

 

how-to-say-i-love-you-in-thai

รักต้นไม้บ้างมั้ย = RAK thon-mai baang mai? (Do you LOVE trees?)

How to Say I Love You in Thai?

The quick answer is: chan rak ter or ฉันรักเธอ, but I’d recommend reading further because in context-light language like Thai, choosing the right words and sentences depends on who is talking as well as who you are talking to.

You can click on the blue words and phrases to hear the audio of the Thai word or sentence.

Whether you are studying Thai or just have a significant other that you are trying to impress,  you may be interested in learning how to say I love you in Thai.  Even if you don’t go very deep into Thai language, learning short phrases like this can really win you some bonus points with your partner.

Aside from just knowing how to use and pronounce these Thai phrases correctly, you’ll also hear many of them in Thai songs, Thai soaps and Thai movies.  

In addition to learning the different Thai phrases for “I love you,” we’ll also introduce some of the more common expressions and useful sentences that use the word “love” which is “rak” or รัก in Thai language.

Words for ‘I Love You’ in Thai

how-to-say-i-love-you-in-thai2

หมีมีความรักด้วย

 

The most common expression you’ll probably encounter for “I love you” in Thai across all forms of media is ฉันรักเธอ (chan rak ter).  ฉัน (chan) is generally used as the primary female pronoun, but guys use it in love songs and sometimes on Thai tv and movies. I don’t recommend using this in real life, however if you are male as it can sound a little silly.  You can either drop the pronoun entirely, or use one of the other choices below.  

One thing you will notice pretty quickly in Thai is that the pronouns (like ‘I’ and ‘you’) is often dropped.

When in doubt, just pay attention to how Thai people talk to each other (in real life as opposed to on tv) and copy what they do.  It may take a while sometimes before you can find the answer, but it’s worth the effort.

ฉันรักเธอ (chan rak ter) – I love you.  

ฉัน chan I (primarily used by females)
รัก rak love
เธอ ter you (intimate); she

 

Basic Phrases for “I Love You” in Thai

Choosing the best phrase isn’t always easy.  You’ll probably come across these phrases in textbooks, phrasebooks and other web sites.  I don’t really recommend using them, but they won’t do you any harm.

ผมรักคุณ phom rak khun I love you.  (male speaker)
ฉันรักคุณ chan rak khun I love you.  (female speaker)

 

Thai Sentence Pattern: A รัก B

Here’s the basic sentence pattern saying ‘I love you’ in Thai.

“A loves B,” is what you want to start with, but choosing the correct pronouns to use in Thai can be a little complicated.  Gender, status, age and relationship all have an affect on the words that you should use to refer to both yourself and to whom you are speaking to.

As a learner of the language, you are expected to make mistakes so don’t worry about it too much.  It’s a pretty soft minefield so you won’t lose any limbs. Just keep in mind that the more familiar/intimate/close you are with a person, the more freedom you’ll have to use the informal expressions.

In Thai, it’s very common to drop pronouns when it’s obvious who the target is.  We’ll look at this more in the next section.

Informal ‘I Love You’ in Thai

Since declaring your love for someone tends to be a pretty informal situation to begin with, I’d really recommend becoming familiar with the more informal Thai love phrases you can use with your partner.  You can almost always drop one or both pronouns if it’s clear who is saying what to who.  You can also do this if you just aren’t sure which pronoun to use.

Which Thai pronoun to use?

How to Refer to Your Partner in Thai

Informal;
ผัว poo-ah husband (often used even if not married)
เมีย mia wife (often used even if not married)
Formal:
สามี saa-mee husband
ภรรยา pha-ra-yaa wife

 

General:
แฟน fan boyfriend/girlfriend/partner
ที่รัก thee-rak dear/lover/babe/sweetie

Bonus Thai Love Phrases

 

รักผมรึยัง rak phom rue yang Do you love me yet? (male speaker)
รักฉันรึยัง rak chan rue yang Do you love me yet? (female speaker)
รักไม่เป็น rak mai ppen I don’t know how to love.
ตกหลุมรัก tok lum rak Fall in love (fall-hole-love)
แสดงความรัก sa-dang kwaam rak to show or express love

 

 

Noun vs Verbs in Thai

The word รัก (rak) that we looked at above is going to act as a verb in most cases.  In order to form the noun version of “love” in Thai, you just add the word ความ (kwaam) in front of รัก (rak).  You’ll use the noun form in sentences where you are talking about the concept or idea of love.

Final Thoughts

There are plenty of ways to say “I love you” in Thai and this list is not exhaustive, but hopefully we’ve given you enough to get started with.  Remember, that part of learning a language (or any skill!) involves making mistakes and embracing this early on will make the journey go much smoother.

Want to Learn to Read Thai?

Perhaps, the most important part of learning Thai is mastering the script, sounds and tone rules.   It’s very difficult to learn the correct pronunciation using any type of English transliteration and the sooner you get away from it, the faster your Thai will improve.

Try a couple free lessons from my Thai foundation course which teaches everything you need to know about the script, sound system and tone rules of Thai.

Filed Under: Beginner, How to speak Thai, Learn Thai, Learn Thai Online Tagged With: , , ,

Learn To Read Thai

October 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Learning to read again in a new language can seem rather daunting, even painful at times.  Even after you’ve gotten comfortable with the Thai script and can learn how the Thai tone rules work,  moving on to longer sentences and eventually short texts can be intimidating.

How I Learned to Read Thai

I spent a couple of years crazily trying to read whatever Japanese books I could get my hands on. Manga, language learning theories, fiction, old literature, etc. What I’ve discovered is that it was a mistake to read manga  or whatever solely because it was manga (or because I heard lots of Japanese learning websites recommend doing so) and it was in Japanese. I just wasn’t couldn’t get into it.   If you are going to invest a lot of time in something, it’s better to spend lots of time trying to read things that you might enjoy.  Be picky.  Because of the enormous amount of time and exposure required, we want to spend as little time as possible being bored and/or frustrated

What I ended up doing is trying to re-read many of the books I read when I was younger.  And when I was a kid, I read lots of Stephen King. So, I went to amazon.jp and ja.wikipedia.org and started to read about Stephen King books that I’ve read in the past and know pretty well. Reviews, summaries, character descriptions, etc. And its been great. Even though every single page has plenty of words that I don’t know, I know enough that can skip as many of those words as I want. I mine everything for sentences of things that I want to see again in my SRS. But the two most important things going on here are that I’m enjoying reading, and I am READING. I only read as long as it stays interesting. If I start spacing out or getting bored or frustrated…I do something else, or go look for something else to read. I can always come back to the current one if I feel like it or just try again tomorrow.

So anyways, I’ve devoured a lot of Stephen King stuff in the past few days and tonight I’m poking around summaries of Star Wars and Robocop. I also really wanna get my hands on some of the Jp translations of SK’s books. (I eventually did)

What YOU Should do to Learn to Read Thai

Anyways, how does this help you? Well, I’d say Thai is more limited than Japanese as far as I know in regards to translations from English when it comes to books. However, there are loads of movies and tv series to work with. So as I’m writing this, Lost is on tv so I figured that was good enough to start with. If you watch that, or Prison Break, Heroes some other show (the early version of this post was written in 2012!), we might have some material to work with.  If there isn’t a Thai wiki for whatever show/movie you’d like to read about, just Google it.  There’s always some Thai people talking about any popular drama out there somewhere.  If you don’t care about tv and movies, then read wiki pages and blogs about whatever interests you.  Find translations of books you read a long time ago and try and read them again in Thai.  You’ll probably remember some of the story which makes it a lot easier to access.  There will likely be loads of words that you don’t know and that’s ok.  Just work out what you can and don’t look up every word.  The important stuff will keep appearing.

So again, how do we go about reading this stuff when we still suck?  Let’s look at a few sentences and how we can break them down into smaller chunks that we might want to put in our notes (and/or flashcards if you use them).

Practice Reading Thai with Wikipedia Articles

First sentence from the Prison Break Wiki
Prison Break เป็นซีรีส์แอ็กชัน ดราม่า ทางโทรทัศน์ ออกอากาศครั้งแรกทางช่องฟ็อกซ์
This one is full of SRS goodness. What have we got?

Prison Break เป็นซีรีส์ – PB is a series

Prison Break เป็นซีรีส์แอ็กชัน PB is an action series

Prison Break เป็นซีรีส์ดราม่า PB is a drama series

Prison Break เป็นซีรีส์ ทางโทรทัศน์ PB is a tv series

PB เป็นซีรีส์ออกอากาศครั้งแรกทางช่องฟ็อกซ์ – PB is a tv series that was first broadcast on/by Fox.

Get the idea yet? Let’s look at the the first line from the Lost Wiki. A bit longer you may notice.

Lost เป็นดราม่าซีรีส์ที่อเมริกา ที่มีเนื้อหากล่าวถึงผู้รอดชีวิตจากอุบัติเหตุเครื่องบินตก บนเกาะลึกลับ

See anything from the Prison Break sentence in this one?

Lost เป็นดราม่าซีรีส์ – Lost is a drama series

Lost เป็นดราม่าซีรีส์ที่อเมริกา – Lost is a drama series in America

Lost เป็นซีรีส์ ที่มีผู้รอดชีวิตจากอุบัติเหตุเครื่องบินตก = Lost is a series about survivors of a plane crash

Lost เป็นซีรีส์ ที่มีผู้รอด เครื่องบินตก บนเกาะ – Lost is a series of plane crash survivors on an island

บนเกาะลึกลับ – on a mysterious island

Tear apart the sentence until its only got 1 thing it in you don’t know. And if you are still trying to practice reading at a basic level then keep the phrases really short, but don’t waste time with single words. Words out of context are forgotten too easily. There isn’t anything wrong with having a few of the same sentence with only one word changed.

Now, go try and skim through a few of those. Set goals.  Do a few sentences like this each day.  You don’t need to make flashcards for everything.  But, it’s often worth noting down stuff that you see a lot of and want to remember or anything that jumps out at you. Its always ok to delete flashcards and toss your notes.   And when you get up into the thousands it’s a good idea.

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How to say FOR in Thai

June 26, 2009 by 4 Comments

When I first wanted to know the word for “for” in Thai,  my Lonely Planet Phrasebook said สำหรับ or samrap.  While สำหรับ does mean “for,” in many cases, it is not the best answer.

for in thai

Samrap you, samrap me?

There are 3 main ways to say “for” in Thai.   Luckily, there is often some overlap with their English equivalents, but it may take a bit to get used to which word you’ll need to use in each situation.  I’ll include some key examples in this post so you can get an idea which is which.

“FOR” in Thai

The first version of “for” that we will look at is “ สำหรับ” (sam-rap).

This version of “for” is often used when talking about what the purpose of a thing is or what it’s intended use is. Let’s look at the sentence “games for kids”.  The “for” in this sentence essentially means “intended to be used by”.  This is how the word สำหรับ (sam-rap) is used in Thai.

สำหรับ (sam-rap) + NOUN = for (use by/of)

สำหรับ can also be attached to a verb phrase.  This is similar to how we would say a phrase like “a pen for ipad.”  The “for” means something like “for the purpose of.”

The usage is just sap-rap สำหรับ  + the verb:

สำหรับ (sam-rap) + VERB = “intended to used to do X”

Here are some more examples:

For in Thai  (for the benefit of)

The next Thai version of “for” that we’re going to look at is the word เพื่อ (phuea).  เพื่อ (phuea) means something like in order to; for the benefit of; for the purpose of someone or something.  For example “to work for my family”.  The “for” in this sentence means something like “for the benefit of”.

This word is used for all the organizations and foundations.  School for the blind, for the people, etc.

เพื่อ (phuea) – for the benefit/purpose of someone/something; in order to

For in Thai (on behalf of/ in case of)

The third version of “for” that we will look at is เผื่อ (phuea).  This can mean something similar to the English “in case of something” or “on behalf of”  

In these examples, เผื่อ works like “in case.”

While in these very commonly used examples, เผื่อ functions as “on behalf of”

These are often used when you are telling someone you are going to do something…go eat, go out, go on a trip, etc and the person you are speaking to says this to mean something like “do it/one for me too!”

English example, you are heading out to the pub, but your friend is sick or has to stay home in work – they might say ‘Drink one for me!”

เผื่อ (phuea) –

Thai Tone Tip:

Although the word เผื่อ (phuea) and เพื่อ (phuea) above share the same vowel and same initial consonant sound, they are spoken with a different tone.  As Thai is a tonal language, this can change the meaning of a word.  Click on the audio for both words again and pay attention to tones of each word. เพื่อ (phuea) is spoken with a falling tone – meaning the tone rises and then falls again, while the word เผื่อ (phuea) is spoken with a low tone.  

These 2 words take different tones because of 2 factors: their initial consonant AND the tone mark.

  • เผื่อ – Is a LOW tone, because it begins with the because class consonant ผ and has the 1st Tone Mark.
  • เพื่อ – takes a FALLING tone because it’s a low class consonant with the first tone mark.

While you need to know the 4 tone marks in order to determine the tone of a word or syllable in Thai, you ALSO need to know the CONSONANT CLASS of the word as each of the 3 classes has slightly different tone rules that you’ll need to master in order to learn to speak Thai fluently.

It does take a bit of work, but you can learn to read and speak Thai.  Sign up below and we’ll send you some free lessons from our Learn Thai Inner Circle program.

For in Thai: Bonus Round ให้

ให้ (hai) is a very versatile word which has lots of different uses.  Depending on the sentence it can mean: to give; to allow; to make someone do something; and it can also be used as the preposition, “for.”   If this sounds intimidating, try to explain to a non-native English speaker what “get” means.

 Sentences Where “For” Isn’t Used in Thai

Even though there are lots of ways to say “for” in Thai, there are a number of sentences where “for” is not used.

Below are some situations where we use “for” in English but not in Thai.

Situation 1: When talking about how long something has been or will be done for.

Example sentences:

Even though in English we need to use the word “for” in these sentences, in Thai there is no equivalent version of “for” used.

Situation 2: When thanking someone or saying sorry for doing something.

Example sentences:

Once again, there is no version of “for” used in these Thai sentences.

Farang Tip:

We understand that trying to memorize all of this will be impossible for most people.  Just bookmark this page and come back to reference it as needed.   Whenever you run into a situation where you want to say something and you don’t know how, make a note somewhere and look it up, send us a message, or ask on a app like HiNative.

Filed Under: Beginner, Learn Thai Tagged With: , , ,