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    Little Miss Fon Sat on Her Kon: A Sanook Guide to the Thai Language
    Little Miss Fon Sat on Her Kon: A Sanook Guide to the Thai Language
    Little Miss Fon Sat on Her Kon: A Sanook Guide to the Thai Language
    Ebook64 pages50 minutes

    Little Miss Fon Sat on Her Kon: A Sanook Guide to the Thai Language

    By Jay Walken

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    About this ebook

    An uncensored, unconventional guide for non-uptight readers with a sense of humor, this supplementary Thai language guide was written by an expat who made many expensive mistakes until he began to understand something about the Thai people and the Thai language! Subjective, non-pc, non-authoritative, because making mistakes is one of the best ways to learn a language and endear yourself to locals.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJay Walken
    Release dateMar 2, 2013
    ISBN9781501475894
    Little Miss Fon Sat on Her Kon: A Sanook Guide to the Thai Language

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      Little Miss Fon Sat on Her Kon - Jay Walken

      Acknowledgments

      The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge the following Thai women, who taught him much of the little Thai that he knows:

      A, B, D, E, F, G, M, P, U, V . . .

      and especially the lovely and soovye maak Naam, for giving him the best language lesson any mortal has ever received from a Thai angel since the beginning of time—by teaching him how to count from 1 to 20 in Thai by using all of his fingers and all of his toes. It is a lesson he promises to remember in all his future lives as an ant, an elephant, and as a ma-aa (or maa, and possibly grand-maa).

      Author’s Disclaimer and Preface

      If you’re looking for a scholarly, pedantic, and 100 percent cocksure guide to speaking perfect Thai, you are in the wrong place, my friend. There are dozens of more authoritative books, and I suggest you find them; best of all, hire a real Thai tutor.

      But if you are, like me, easygoing and open-minded, with a sense of humor and curiosity about other ways of thinking, and are willing to try a personal, subjective view of Thailand and its language from someone who has, like you, spent time in Thailand starting with zero Thai words, but who made many mistakes and slowly learned to experience the joy of language and of communication, you might, just possibly, like it.

      I was able to make friends with Thais who knew almost zero English—mainly girl friends or brief girl-friends-for-an-hour (the hour often repeated for days and sometimes weeks), because, thanks to the equipment that hangs between my legs, I have no interest in men (other than as conversational companions, when they happen to be intelligent and well-informed; or as true, non-sexual friends or retailers of wisdom).

      So maybe, just maybe—no guarantees—this book will interest you as one man’s journey through a country and through language, with that man’s interest in sharing his knowledge and a bit of laughter being genuine, so genuine that he has persevered through around 50 editions of this book for little to no compensation. Therefore, primarily a labor of love.

      [Contd. at the back so as not to hog the preview space]

      I Love You Maak Maak

      As a world traveler who has visited dozens of countries and spent at least seven years in three Asian countries, including Thailand, I have found some language guides and phrase books to be somewhat dry, besides leaving out vital phrases and anatomical words. Also, I have wasted precious time memorizing phrases or words which, once learned, I rarely or never had occasion to use. Besides, some books require you to keep referring back to a pronunciation key, which I find frustrating and inconvenient.

      (This assessment of available resources in Thai was made long back; things have changed so much for the better that perhaps you don’t need this book, unless you’re determined to read it for its quirky, goofy, and non-traditional angles and its humor.)

      At that time, it took me six months, or six month-long trips, to learn my first fifty words of Thai. It took me eight months, and well after I had made love to a gorgeous, longhaired woman named Naam, before I realized that naam* was the Thai word for water. It took me nine months to realize that Me have ploblem, when uttered by a Thai woman in a certain context, probably meant that she was having her period. (*However, I already knew that hong-naam meant toilet, and would later learn that wai-naam meant to swim and ab-naam meant "to have a bath/shower.")

      None of this meant that I didn’t have a pretty good time. Above all, the Thai language and Thai women often made me laugh, saying mew when they meant milk or breasts. I was deeply touched as well as tickled to hear bar girls sing the first line of a famous Kylie Minogue song: I jess can get you outta my hair! (a hugely popular song then, guaranteed to get everyone on the floor, dancing). One of the greatest joys of Thailand, for me as a man, is to listen to Thai as well as Thinglish

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