I have been meaning to learn Thai but I don't know how to go about doing this I wonder if any of you have any advice for me.

I have been trying an app that's called drops but I don't feel like I'm learning as much as I hoped I would

My two satangs: Make yourself a plan. Good way is to go to some Thai course pages and copy their syllabus/course programs. Based on those, make your own list of things to learn, be it topics or grammar points. When you have learned, say, basic greetings, mark that done. This will make your studying more structured and also will give you stronger sense of going forward when you see how much you have already learned.

I don't say it is necessary to start with the Thai script, because many people don't. However, I learned the writing system pretty early on, because I got fed up with the inadequate and confusing jumble of transliteration systems. I recommend Thai Pod's videos (youtube) for this. I watched the videos about writing, while writing down everything. I also downloaded app Write it! Thai, which was a great simple way to exercise the consonants. And then I just scribbled away all kinds of words or just letters in different sizes and colours and filled couple of notebooks with them. Repetition is the key after all. I wrote down Thai subtitles and translated them, I wrote down song lyrics and translated those. I copied wikipedia pages of stuff I am interested in. With subs and lyrics and other texts I wrote first the line in Thai, then transliteration on next line and under that the translation. Idk, handwriting just works for me, so I do that a lot. The app I have been using for cramming basic vocabulary is Fun Easy Learn. You can use it with or without transliterations. After trying several others I found that it works for me. It may be for you or it may not, we are all different in what works for us.

Try vocatching (my own word: short for vocabulary watching) Watch your fave series again and when you see something interesting based on the subs, a word, a saying, figure it out and write it down. You may have to go back and forth a couple of times and then hunt the word or saying from the online dictionaries, but it will get easier when you get better at listening. I have an excel sheet full of stuff I have picked from series or books or news or where-ever and it is kinda awesome way to remember words, because they automatically have strong context. Read aloud. Those subs, those song lyrics, what ever. Repeat things people say in the series aloud. Infographics are amazing in learning vocabulary around certain topic. Google picture hunt! Figuring out good search terms in Thai is an exercise in itself. I basically go infographics hunting whenever I have some subject that I am learning in life in general. Doing chemical safety test? Also finding Thai infographics about chemical safety! Try that yummy Thai khanom you saw in the series, but instead of picking English recipe from the internet, take a Thai one and translate it first.

Great Youtube channel I warmly recommend for exercising listening: https://www.youtube.com/@ComprehensibleThai There are so many channels teaching Thai and you should to take a look at others, too, of course. Find what suits you. There is also great podcast You Too Can Learn Thai, which I like a lot. (Khru Nan ❤️) I also started listening podcasts in Thai language quite early on, just to get used to listening Thai. I really like already finished https://thestandard.co/podcast_channel/happiness/, where the topic is different aspects of happiness. The author has such a pleasant voice and he speaks very clearly. Also ongoing podcast วันนี้เป็นยังไงบ้าง (=How are you today?) is my fave. Interestingly, that also revolves around happiness, more or less. This may seem a lot, but I believe in multiangle approach in learning in general. It is imho important to have many ways you can study, so that you don't get bored. And also it gives information different anchoring points in your memory when you receive it in different forms. Okay, I have babbled a lot. I wish you fun times with Thai, which I know you will have, because it is a wonderful, wonderful language. Feel free to knock my internet door any time. 😊

i am so very sorry but i have to share. in case anyone was wondering, here's how 'impossible' is expressed in thai.

'เป็นไปไม่ได้'

and a word-for-word translation, just to show you how in-fucking-sane this is:

'is go not can'

yeah, possible is 'is go can'.

HOW??? was there no easier way to express this?? could y'all not have vome up with a word for possible?

This is what makes studying languages fun for me! I often find myself amused by direct translations of expression or syntactical features of foreign languages. Every language has these, for example in English there are so many idioms that are silly in my native language (fill out? let on? Phrasal verbs are a gold mine of silliness for non-English speakers, let me tell you.), but after speaking English for several decades now, I don't really pay attention to them anymore. My own native language has really weird sayings that I never even noticed, but that were pointed out by foreigners studying Finnish.

Aaaanyhow, in this particular Thai expression: เป็นไป is an idiomatic verb (=phrasal verb), that means "happen, take place, continue, progress" As such it can be replaced with expressions like เกิดขึ้น or มีขึ้น Now, when we add things...

เป็นไปได้ - it becomes literally "[thing that] can happen" = [is] possible and ไม่ just makes it "[thing that] cannot happen" = [is] impossible

"[to be] impossible" can be said in other ways too, like: ทำไม่ได้, ไม่มีทาง. Or just add ไม่ได้ to those synonyms of เป็นไป from above

พ้นวิสัย is also a nice, syntactically different expression for impossible. Literally it means "[to be] beyond ability".

(The stuff in brackets comes from the fact that Thai is flexible with verb/adjective function of the words. It helps to remember that in most of the cases adjective comes with "to be" attached. For example: คุณสวย " You [are] beautiful." It doesn't need separate verb "to be", and adding one is, in fact, bad grammar.)

thanks for the fill-in! also, i am sorry, but the one absolute funniest fact to me about this is that you're apparently Finnish? since im Hungarian, and idk, our languages are supposed to work in similar ways i think?

i do still find the whole expression for impossible impossibly funny. and i love this language

Szia! Hei!

Finno-Ugric fist bump!

Our ancestors may have shared a yurt somewhere on their way from Siberia 5000 years ago 😁 There are plenty of grammatic similarities between Hungarian and Finnish, like awesome lack of genders, soooo many cases (you win in this - kudos) and agglutination. Pronunciation-wise, to me Hungarian is so fascinating, because it sounds familiar, like I should get it, but nope, I cannot understand it at all. 😊 Vocabularies have very little in common, several thousand of years make a big difference. Both languages have been strongly influenced by the other languages surrounding them. Örvendek! Hauska tutustua! 😊 And agreed, Thai is such a fun language. I fall in love with it every day💕 and lose my nerve with it almost as often. I hope you are having as awesome time with it as I am. If you wanna talk about Thai or whatever, just throw a pebble at me. 😊

i am so very sorry but i have to share. in case anyone was wondering, here's how 'impossible' is expressed in thai.

'เป็นไปไม่ได้'

and a word-for-word translation, just to show you how in-fucking-sane this is:

'is go not can'

yeah, possible is 'is go can'.

HOW??? was there no easier way to express this?? could y'all not have vome up with a word for possible?

This is what makes studying languages fun for me! I often find myself amused by direct translations of expression or syntactical features of foreign languages. Every language has these, for example in English there are so many idioms that are silly in my native language (fill out? let on? Phrasal verbs are a gold mine of silliness for non-English speakers, let me tell you.), but after speaking English for several decades now, I don't really pay attention to them anymore. My own native language has really weird sayings that I never even noticed, but that were pointed out by foreigners studying Finnish.

Aaaanyhow, in this particular Thai expression: เป็นไป is an idiomatic verb (=phrasal verb), that means "happen, take place, continue, progress" As such it can be replaced with expressions like เกิดขึ้น or มีขึ้น Now, when we add things...

เป็นไปได้ - it becomes literally "[thing that] can happen" = [is] possible and ไม่ just makes it "[thing that] cannot happen" = [is] impossible

"[to be] impossible" can be said in other ways too, like: ทำไม่ได้, ไม่มีทาง. Or just add ไม่ได้ to those synonyms of เป็นไป from above

พ้นวิสัย is also a nice, syntactically different expression for impossible. Literally it means "[to be] beyond ability".

(The stuff in brackets comes from the fact that Thai is flexible with verb/adjective function of the words. It helps to remember that in most of the cases adjective comes with "to be" attached. For example: คุณสวย " You [are] beautiful." It doesn't need separate verb "to be", and adding one is, in fact, bad grammar.)

Reblog to let your followers know that despite your current obsession your previous obsessions still exist and are simply lying dormant until they awaken and strike again

QUEER JOY

Sometimes I coast into this happy, glowing daze, and when I trace all these golden filaments around me to their source, I find my little shining harbor of queer love in media.

As a kid, I only knew queer stories run through with anguish and regret and shame. Reality echoed the same. The gnarled pain of AIDS lingered in everything, and I learned the term “gay panic” from headlines when it was used as a defense for murder.

I started reading the end of novels and watching the last scene of a movie or TV show. Generally, if the queer characters didn’t die, their happiness did.

When I was a teenager on the cusp of realizing my queerness, I craved stories about queer characters who not only got to live at the end of their stories, but queer characters who got to fall in love without punishment. Who got to the last page or the last scene and got to rest in bliss.

I watched shows like Queer as Folk in secret. I sought out any hint of queerness in shows around the world. I wrote queerness in fic where I wished it had been in canon.

When I watched Until We Meet Again in 2020, I couldn’t believe it was real. I devoured SOTUS after that, and Dark Blue Kiss, and Gameboys, and I Told Sunset About You. These queer stories where no one died. Where no one was punished by the narrative for being queer. Where no cruel, underlying message told the audience, “Only agony awaits the deviant queers—as it should.”

That’s why I never take this new era of queer media for granted. It’s what I always dreamed of having when I was young.

It’s queer joy.

And I’m grateful for it every day.

having a husband who is a forensic science student who does nothing but study skeletons all day is ridiculous because we were in the middle of doing...adult....stuff....and he suddenly just grabbed my head and said "oh my god, you know you've got a healed skull fracture here?!" like WHAT do you MEAN I have a HEALED SKULL FRACTURE???

he told me my skull healed really weirdly and I probably have brain damage from it because there's a fuckin crater in the back of my skull that I just thought was a normal thing everyone has. I should probably see a doctor

update on this: he keeps like grabbing random body parts and trying (and failing) to subtly look at me and im like STOP EXAMINING ME because he's so fascinated by my fucked up skeletal structure. the other day we had Christmas drinks with my coworkers and he told me afterwards that someone in the group had a weird shaped skull and something about processes and i was like god can't you just be normal and stop examining people

I told the person I'm dating that one reason I like old movies is because most actors don't have Hollywood-perfect smiles and I like to look at all the different shapes of their crooked teeth and misaligned bites and the way their silver and gold molar fillings flash when they talk.

They just looked at me and said "That's such an anthropologist thing to like," and honestly? No rebuttal possible.

(After this conversation I drunkenly showed them my favorite pages of my paleopathology textbook. Bless them for not immediately running as I caressed an image of a snapped femur that healed at a 90 degree angle.)

anyway the actual point of fandom is to inspire each other. reading each other's fics and admiring each other's art and saying wow i love this and i feel something and i want to invoke this in other people, i want to write a sentence that feels like a meteor shower, i want to paint a kiss with such tenderness it makes you ache, i want to create something that someone else somewhere will see it and think oh, i need to do that too, right now. i am embracing being a corny cunt on main to say inspiring each other is one of the things humanity is best at and one of the things fandom is built for and i think that's beautiful

lord the peasants are so loud today

pheasants. PHeasants. The birds

Don't you mean classist Typo, as in discriminating against poor people, and not classicist, the type of academic who studies antiquity in southern Europe?

Achievement unlocked!

Fire post!

WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE POST IS ON FIRE

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very cool but also kind of a dick move

Stop making Hannibal furry headcanons unless it’s this bird

It's apparently only ONE population of this species that does this. Everyone else hunts and caches normally. The other falcons probably talk shit about this fucked up torture family.

The secret wish is to write a fanfic that someone loves so much they make fan art of it, or to create a drawing that someone creates an entire fic based off of it.

I especially love these two excerpts from her wiki page

I tell kids about Tilly ALL THE TIME when I'm doing tsunami presentations for my job. She lived in a landlocked part of England! She probably thought she would never ever ever use what she learned in her geography class about tsunamis and then just a few weeks later she used it to save over one hundred lives! It's an incredible story about how anything can happen anytime, and we need to be prepared to act.

What I think is most important about her story is that, even as a kid, Tilly knew she was right and she stuck to that knowledge. She practically threw a fit until her parents listened to her, because at first they kept brushing her off. And that is SO IMPORTANT for our kids to know! Adults can be wrong. You need to trust your instincts. YOU can be right and YOU can act in times of danger and emergency. YOU have the power to save yourself and others.

Why the fuck would you taste it?!

Fun archeology fact! Sometimes when you find bone fragments they look like rocks. When this happens there is one quick, easy, surefire way to make sure which they are. You gotta lick it. Bones are porous and will stick to your tongue whereas rocks will not. Any way, that’s how we sometimes know what bones taste like.

The origin of the word “apricot”