Thenglish, ??? Mai pen rai.

For my English speaking audience.


Hello guys , How is your Dutch progressing. I sincerely apologize that my web page is in Dutch. However I do not forget about you. Today’s contribution is about language. An excellent opportunity to sharpen my English writing skills.

As you may know the Thai language is a tonal language. Each word can have up to five meanings or even more, depending on the tone spoken – high, medium, low, falling or rising. “Mai” can mean a question make, no, new, wood, silk, microphone or burn. Well this exceptional one has seven meanings. Still with me?

So if you want to say: “new wood (or silk or microphone) doesn’t burn, does it? It could be written as “mai, mai, mai, mai, mai?” Perhaps now you start to understand why Thai is almost impossible to learn or understand for any farang.

I decided to quit Thai lessons quite rapidly and to stick to Thenglish. Thenglish is my specialty. The rules, as defined by myself are very simple. A sentence may consist of 5 words max, only one verb, don’t use any past or future tense, use extremely simple words. An example: me (point to yourself), pick-up, gate, 5 pm.

Even then, communication tends to go wrong. I have already told you about my previous experience when I needed five different colors of TAPE and my driver bought me five different colors CAKE (we had a good party though). This week I needed 4 hardheads, any color but white, to have the user stand out from any common factory worker. I instructed my safety officer to “buy 4 hardheats in different colour than white”. I’m sure you have already seen that I violated my Thenglish rules (too many words), resulting in the guy being totally confused. He ordered a pink, orange, green and red hardhead. Yep…….mai pen rai. (doesn’t matter).