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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, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

How to SRS Better – Making Good Flashcards that Stick

January 24, 2009 by 3 Comments

2020 Update: Anki is still not as easy to use as it should be, but I do go through phases where I use flashcards.

2015 Update: I no longer use an SRS (Spaced Repetition System) to the extent that I did years ago. While they are very effective at moving information into your long-term memory, they are not very fun.  I also found that being able to produce an answer for a flashcard does not always translate at being able to use that information in a real-life conversation. I would limit your time spent on flashcards each day and increase the time and frequency spent actually trying to speak and read the language you are studying.   

Start simple, but not too much so.  We usually want to learn words in phrases because without them you won’t know how to use the word properly.  We use the SRS to keep those patterns fresh enough in our mind so they stay at the fringes where things are hard to pull back, but just close enough that we can reel them back in when we encounter them.

Don’t put a whole lot of crap you don’t understand into a card.  This won’t help you.  Neither will overloading yourself so much with SRS cards early on that it makes the task too stressful.  One or 2 new points per card.  Build on what you know.  Its ok to build on cards you already have as long as you don’t make them too long.   Trust me on this, I suspend cards all the time because they are boring, too long, or for whatever reason they don’t seem to wanna go into my head.  Whatever the reason, suspend them or get rid of them.  You don’t need it now, that’s all.

As per Bob’s request, here is an example plus clarification in how to go about making good SRS cards.

Here is something I just grabbed from the news…

ตำรวจฮ่องกงจับชายผู้หนึ่งหลังขับรถพุ่งเข้าชนรถแท็กซี่ทำให้มีผุ้เสียชีวิต 6 คน

This sentence is long.  You probably won’t ever want a card this long.  When you can read stuff like the above sentence no problem, you should already be reading books and the news like a normal literate person.

But lets say you struggled through the above sentence and wanted to break it up into managable chunks that you can review in your SRS.  This sentence can be broken up quite nicely actually.

ตำรวจ ฮ่องกง จับ ชาย ผู้ หนึ่ง – police-HK-arrest-male-person-one (HK police arrested one male..)

Its still a bit wordy and a bit strange because its a headline.  Let’s say you kn0w the word for police – ตำรวจ, but this is your first time encountering the word จับ.  Since police are often doing the จับ-ing, we could google that to search for more examples, or we could just fill in the blank if we know any words for bad guys.

For example, if you learned the word pirate from my bad joke post, you could say:

ตำรวจ จับ โจรสลัด – police captured the pirate(s)

Now thats a lot easier to grasp.  3 words.  1 or 2 new words per SRS entry is ok.  Don’t put in a sentence full of stuff you don’t understand.  You need comprehensible input, reviewing a sentence you don’t understand at all won’t help much and will cause frustration later.

And there isn’t anything wrong with reinforcing that card with other cards that are similar.  So you may even have another card that says ตำรวจ ฮ่องกง จับ ผู้ร้าย – (HK police catch crimnal).

Mess around with the cards.  You can always delete cards later if you don’t like them.  Cards that stress you out when you encounter them are cards you aren’t ready for.  The point of the cards is to keep the information accessible in your brain via exposure.

Other parts of the original sentence which are worthy of SRS-ing:

  • รถพุ่งเข้าชน
  • มีผุ้เสียชีวิต 6 คน or ทำให้ มี ผุ้ เสียชีวิต 6 คน (caused the deaths of 6 people)
  • ขับ รถ ชน รถแท็กซี่ (crashed a car into a taxi)

Anyways, I hope that helped.  As with anything else, you will get better at SRS-ing with practice.

Rules to follow:

  1. Reviewing is more important than adding
  2. Its ok to delete or suspend cards that cause you to not want to review
  3. Its gotta be a daily thing – no matter how busy you are, spend 2 min and do 5 cards a day at the very least.  Do more when you can, but don’t ever do none.

If you want to read up more on SRS-ing, check out Antimoon’s site here.

Filed Under: Learn Thai Tagged With: , ,

How to Read Thai News

August 21, 2008 by 5 Comments

Do you read the news everyday?  At least the headlines that pop up on whatever sites you happen to frequent?  Well, why don’t you read them in Thai? It’s not that hard to start reading the news in Thai.

I scan headlines in Japanese and Thai nearly everyday and I read any articles that sound interesting.  You don’t need to be particularly skilled in a language to start reading the news.  You may be thinking I’m crazy, and while I can’t really argue with that, I’m actually quite serious.

What is a headline anyways?  Its a short, catchy, grammatically simple phrase or sentence thats meant to lure us into reading further.  Following the headline is the lead which tells us the who-what-where-why-when-how-izms of the story.  The language used is considerably more finite than that say of literature or even magazines so in a very short time we can begin flying through those handful of sentences.

Tips to Remember

  • We only want the main idea – if you can grasp it while not knowing every word and not having to look any up – you are golden!
  • Learn the words/abbreviations for places and be able to recognize which words are just names of people and places you’ve never heard of and ignore them.
  • Stick to the same type of news for a while (I prefer crime and disasters)
  • Do it everyday – Start easy – 2-5 minutes (it quickly becomes easier and more interesting as you can work out the story very quickly and then reread to get any extra details)
  • Don’t look everything up!  You aren’t likely to remember it all anyways so its just a waste of energy.  You will begin to see the same words again and again and you will remember them and how they are used because of the repetitiveness found in the news.

And if this still sounds too daunting then there is another equally effective way – read an article in English first, than look it up in the language(s) you are learning and read it there.  It isn’t always going to be a translation, but the story is the same so its often just a matter of writing style.  You can still greatly benefit from this method as well.  Do whatever works, or rather whatever seems less like work as in the end it comes down to you and what you do on your own time.  I don’t have time to teach you everything (nor do I know enough myself!) and you are a fool if you think any school or textbook can give you everything you need.

All I can do is save you some time by eliminating as many of the mistakes I made as possible from your journey into fluency.  Each language you learn makes it easier because you become aware of all the things you did wrong the last time.

Filed Under: Learn Thai Tagged With: , , ,

Consistency is Key

August 24, 2008 by 4 Comments

*This is an early post from 2008 where I had already spent 5 years learning Thai and a number of other languages.  All of these habits and strategies are still useful today.

Learning Thai or other languages isn’t as hard as you think.  Kids learn languages all the time it right?  Hell, babies do it.  We are smarter than babies right?  The biggest obstacle to language learning is usually that you believe you can do it.  Somewhere along the line you allowed yourself to be convinced that learning a new language was too hard for YOU. That was a mistake.  It’s easy.  I learned to speak 4 more than I started with in as many years.  It doesn’t take a genius to learn a language.  Stupid people tend to be able to talk just fine.  I hear them each and every day.

The main thing that you need to accept when you begin to learn a language is that its going to take a long time.  You can’t learn a language in a day, a week or a month.  Its going to probably take a year before you can stop sounding like a fob tourist, but perhaps not depending where you are and how you go about it.

Obviously taking a class seems like a good idea (and can be occasionally).  Most people don’t have the self-discipline to do anything every day if there is no outside pressure (grades, parents, money, hygiene, etc) looming over us.  The same applies for me.  I kind of gave up on Japanese for a while because I couldn’t find a decent teacher and I wasn’t getting any chances to use it.  I still focused on learning the Kanji through James Heisig’s method with the assistance of kanji.koohii.com and I’m doing pretty well with that. But then recently, I have kind of had this Japanese friend so I’ve been trying to take advantage of that situation to get my Japanese back into action.  For Chinese, I have class 2 nights a week so that gives me something, but never enough.  For Korean, I study three times a week and my teacher occasionally beats me, but not nearly as much as she used to thankfully.  I do Cantonese when I have time and motivation, but I don’t know anybody who speaks Cantonese so that language is always on the backburner.  As for Thai, I just try to read stuff once or twice a week when I’m exercising or eating or whatever so I’m always being exposed to new vocabulary that nobody ever says, but its written everywhere.

My favorite trick which I strongly recommend to all my students – carry a small notepad and a pencil with you all of the time.  When you are in a situation where you want to say something and either you can’t figure it out or are just shy or whatever, write it down!  Then ask a few people how to say it.  If you know non-natives who speak the language better than you, they are generally a much better resource than a native – contrary to popular belief.  They can explain the proper usage of the word/phrase and hopefully give examples of situations in which it is used.  Never forget that native speakers generally have no idea how they learned their own language.  I don’t.  But I remember exactly how I learned the other 4 and I can do it again.   I am not a big fan of teaching English, but I occasionally do it because I get paid well for it because I speak Thai like really.

So I always carry my pad and I never guess.  I’m too embarrassed if I screw up, so I just write down whatever I wanted to say and figure out later how to say it.  Then if I can, I try to create a situation where I can use the new information so it sticks in my mind.  If you don’t use it….well you know what happens.  When I am waiting around for elevators, taxis, friends, etc – I review whatever crap is written in my notepad.  A few quick glances during the day and I remember at least half of what goes in the notepad.  I go through a notepad in about 2 months and I have old ones scattered all over my room.  Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, Thai, Burmese, Cantonese, Korean, and more.  You can find random bits of knowledge all over my room.  And plenty of that knowledge got into my head and stayed there.  Just buy the damn notepad.  It’s only a dollar.  Use it every day for a year and call me in the morning.  It works better than any gadget.  Cheap, easy.  No programming, no data loss, no learning curve.

Filed Under: Learn Thai Tagged With: , , ,

Stop Sounding Like a Farang

August 10, 2008 by 13 Comments

Language learners have a tendency to build a protective bubble around themselves over time which can easily lead to number of bad habits.  This bubble grows as people tell you how amazing you are at their language.  In the beginning you know this is crap and you don’t know anything yet.  I mean, how could you?  You are just starting out, right?  As time passes and you begin to get your bearings, we sometimes find ourselves believing that we are really that good and in our vain-ness we become blind to anything resembling our actual ‘level’.

The point of this line of posts is to get rid of as many of those bad habits that so commonly occur when mr/s-farang-come-learn-speak-language-Thai.  You can’t necessarily rely on Thai people to correct your mistakes, because you’ll find that most of them won’t (even when you ask them to and they agree!).  And the logical conclusion we make when nobody corrects us is usually NOTHING IS WRONG.

Consider the following sentence –

ผม จะ ไป ที่ โรงเรียน

See anything wrong here?  Me neither.  Its grammatically correct.  You might even find this exact example in a phrase book or “Learn Thai + <CleverEasySoundingWord>” brought to you by <tokenwhiteguy>.  The problem is that it’s bulky, still and not very natural-sounding.  Farang-sounding even.  Let’s trim the fat off this sentence.

ผม จะ ไป ที่

โรงเรียน (not found)
   Ok – first and most importantly, excessive usage of ที่ is the first bad habit I try to cut out of my student’s mouths.  When Thai people sit around making fun of their friends who supposedly speak Thai very well, this one always comes up.  It’s not wrong and you can get as defensive as you’d like, but it’s just not natural.  Thai people rarely speak like this.   I suspect it originates from the much stricter usage of prepositions in English, but less important than where it comes from is where its going – into the trash. Keep going, you are almost speaking Thai.

ผม จะ ไป

โรงเรียน (not found)
 Alright, we are on the right track now.  Things are sounding better.  But we’re still feeling a bit bloated.  What should we cut next?  School?  Perhaps, but not yet.  Now we want to get get rid of YOU and what I mean by YOU is we need to get rid of ME ..erm .. “I”.

Pronouns folks.  Wrap them all up and put them in storage.  You can pull them out sometimes after you get a feel for when and how they are used.  But until then, it just makes us sound silly because at this point you are still thinking in English and its force of habit that brings all those pronouns along with it.  When you say ผม in Thai, it’s like somebody is standing behind you playing a flute.  It has a very nice, polite feeling to it.  When you are talking to people you don’t know, or in formal situations, by all means you should use it.  But, if you aren talking to your friends or people you see everyday, it’s not necessary.  Thai is a very contextual language which means that it is usually not necessary to specify who is doing what.

ผม จะ ไป ที่ โรงเรียน

Now we are on the right track.  Yet there are still more things we could do here.

For example, if somebody asks you where you are going and you are going to class at school you can just respond as follows:

Somchai:        ไปไหน

TokenFarang: ( จะ) ไป  เรียน

C’mon team – Tie bee eazee!

Remember, while we can translate the exact sentence in many cases, the ultimate goal is to speak like a native, is it not?  So try not to make logical rules in your head because those rules are based on the logic of how your native language(s) works and unless you are from Laos, you are just making the journey into fluency more difficult than it needs to be.

Filed Under: Learn Thai Tagged With: , , ,
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