Learning Thai numbers is similar to English in difficulty and structure. The only real difference is with numbers greater than a thousand but less than a million. You’ll find the list of Thai numbers below to help you learn to count in Thai.
1 = neung
2 = sawng
3 = sahm
4 = see
5 = hah
6 = hok (rhymes with joke)
7 = jet
8 = bat
9 = gow
10 = sip
11 = sip-et
12 to 19 = sip-sawng to sip-gow
20 = yee-sip
21 = yee-sip et
22 to 29 = yee-sip-sawng to yee-sip-gow
30 = sahm-sip
40 = see-sip
50 = hah-sip
60 = hok-sip
70 = jet-sip
80 = bat-sip
90 = gow-sip
100 = roi
101, 102, 103, etc = roi-neung, roi-sawng, roi-sahm, etc
200, 300, 400, etc = sawng-roi, sahm-roi, see-roi, etc
1000 = pan
10,000 = meun
100,000 = sen
1 million = lan
1 billion = pan-lan
The chart below is an attempt to show how you would say a number over a million in English & Thai:
|
lan |
sen | meun | pan | roi |
|
3 |
8 | 7 | 4 | 9 | 21 |
|
Million |
thousand | hundred |
|
3 |
874 | 9 | 21 |
In English, you would say this number as:
three million – eight hundred and seventy four thousand – nine hundred and twenty one.
In Thai, you would say:
sahm lan – bat sen – jet meun – see pan – gow roi – yee sip et.
January 5, 2008 at 10:48 am |
“6 = hok (rhymes with joke)”
hok sounds more like “hawk” – as in the bird versus joke
January 6, 2008 at 5:06 am |
wrong, he had it right with hok (rhymes with joke).
January 6, 2008 at 5:27 am |
I checked with a couple of Thai people, and I am comfortable that with my American accent the closest sound is ‘joke’ but it’s possible that with some British accents anon’s comment may be correct.
Given that this is a blog and not a language school, I’m not really interested in too much discussion over exact pronunciations. This series is designed to be a ‘primer’ for tourists who want to have a collection of fifty or a hundred useful words and phrases for their next whore-mongering trip to the Land of Smiles… let’s not get too serious about it.
January 6, 2008 at 12:37 pm |
you are right and I figured you would react as such…….but it rhymes with JOKE! the yee-sip part is correct too. …..or if you get really local on 20 you can say yip….such as yip et….yip song…..yip saam……the thai lazy tongue. I realize how annoying this is and it’s the last time I will chime in on language…..especially since I am not fluent.
January 6, 2008 at 2:03 pm |
RB: Okay… relax. Don’t forget that rhyming depends on the accent you have. Just ask a New Zealander to count to six for you.
Be a bit careful with the ‘yip’ business; you can use it with shop cashiers, taxi drivers and bar girls. You probably won’t impress your boss or the bank manager with it.
The main reason I want to keep the discussion on this series under control is:
1. I want to keep it simple so it’s not too confusing for the few people that do read it
2. A lot of what I write in this series won’t be grammatically correct (for simplicity’s sake) and it will be the equivelant of ‘bar girl English’… it will be “tourist Thai” — just enough for people to understand. I really don’t want to invite readers to comment on or correct the simplified grammar as I expect that will simply confuse readers who are unfamiliar with Thai language. (As an example, I have a blog coming next week that dicusses how to ask questions in Thai. I have said to put question words at the end of a sentence. Now, in Thai, not all questions words need to be at the end, but some/most do, and all of them can. So it’s easier to tell people to put all question words at the end than spend two thousand words trying to explain when you do, when you don’t and confusing people in the process. Not to mention that I don’t really expect many people to get much use out of these language blogs)
3. People are not going to learn Thai pronunciation (tones, difficult consonants and difficult vowel combinations) from these blogs; it’s fruitless for me to try to teach these in a blog
No one is going to learn to speak Thai from reading my blogs, but it is possible to learn a few useful words and phrases. I try to use words that are easiest to pronounce if you read them written in English. (For example yaag instead of Dtawng-gan, both for it’s informality and its relatively simpler pronunciation. Even so, no foriegner reading the blog is going to understand how to pronounce yaag with it’s rising tone.) I just want to keep it all in perspective — it’s just a blog. I don’t take it too seriously, and I’ve spent hours writing it; I’m hoping readers will be relaxed about it too.
BTW, you will notice that I don’t follow any standard or accepted transliteration system… I just try to render the words in English in the simlest way I can think of to get people close to correct pronunciation.
I’m certainly not fluent in Thai — far from it. That’s one more reason I want to keep the tone of this Thai language blog series light, simple and hopefully mildly helpful to Thailand tourists. Frankly, I wouldn’t expect anyone who lives here to have any interest in them, except as mild entertainment.
January 6, 2008 at 3:03 pm |
By the way, here’s a completely different view about how to learn the Thai language:
Learn to speak Thai without speaking
January 7, 2008 at 1:52 am |
werewolf – no worries about the pronunciation . i never ran into a thai who didn’t understand numbers in english anyways. lol
January 16, 2008 at 10:05 pm |
[...] (For a review of Thai numbers click here) [...]
January 17, 2008 at 10:26 pm |
[...] (For notes on Thai numbers, click here) [...]
January 17, 2008 at 10:29 pm |
[...] Note: for information on Thai numbers, click here [...]
June 24, 2008 at 3:02 am |
[...] (For a review of Thai numbers click here) [...]