Survival Thai for expats: the phrases, tones & politeness that get you through the day

Why a little Thai changes everything

You can live in Bangkok on English alone — our do-you-need-Thai guide makes that honest case in full. But a little Thai pays back out of all proportion: it lowers prices at markets, turns taxi drivers and street vendors into allies, smooths every interaction with your building’s staff, and signals respect in a culture that prizes it. Thais are remarkably encouraging of foreigners who try, and the bar for delight is low — a single well-placed khop khun krap often gets a beaming smile. This guide is the practical companion to that overview: where that one answers “how much do I need?”, this one hands you the actual words, situation by situation, plus the two things that make Thai sound hard at first — tones and politeness particles — explained simply. None of this is a formal course; it’s the working vocabulary of a newcomer’s first months.

The sounds: five tones, explained simply

Thai is a tonal language: the pitch you say a syllable on changes its meaning entirely. There are five tones — mid, low, falling, high and rising. The famous example is mai, which depending on tone can mean “new”, “not”, “wood”, “burn”, or act as a spoken question mark. That sounds terrifying; in practice it rarely is, because:

• Context carries you. If you mime drinking and say nam (water), nobody hears “to lead”. Real situations disambiguate most words.
• Copy, don’t read. Mimicking how a Thai person says a word beats reading romanization flatly. Your ear improves faster than your theory.
• It clicks with exposure. Tones are the number-one reason Thai feels hard in week one and the number-one thing that quietly clicks after a few months of hearing it daily.

You do not need perfect tones to be understood — you need to know they exist so you’re not baffled when a “wrong” word comes out. Treat tone as something you tune over time, not a gate you must clear before speaking.

Why the same Thai word is spelled five different ways

Because the official system throws tone away on purpose. Thailand’s romanisation is the UN-recommended system for Thai: first approved in 1967 (resolution I/14), revised and officially endorsed by the government of Thailand in 2000, then approved at the Eighth UN Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names in Berlin, 2002 (resolution VIII/13). Two sentences from the Principles of Romanization it carries settle every argument you will ever have about Thai spelling. First: “The romanization system is not reversible to its original script form.” Second: tone marks, together with the silencing mark and the vowel shortening mark, “are completely ignored”.

That is the whole problem in two lines. The system on the road signs exists to get a Thai place name into Latin letters, not to get the sound back out of them. Its own worked examples show what goes missing:

So when you meet sawatdee, sawasdee and sawadee in three different places, none is wrong and none is official. They are pronunciation aids, and the ones on this page are ours. It also means no romanised phrasebook can teach you tone, whoever writes it. You get tone from hearing a word said, or from the script, which encodes it.

Politeness: krap, ka and the wai

The single easiest way to sound good in Thai is to end your sentences with the right politeness particle. Which one you use depends on your gender, not the listener’s:

• Men say krap (often heard as “khrap” or a clipped “kap”).
• Women say ka (a softer “kha”, rising on a question).

They don’t translate to one English word — they simply make everything polite and warm, the way a kind tone plus “please” does. Use them generously: sawatdee krap, khop khun ka, or even just krap / ka on its own as a respectful “yes, I understand.” Alongside the words comes the wai — the palms-together slight bow — used in greeting and thanks; as a foreigner you’re not expected to master its hierarchy, just return one offered to you and you’ll be fine. The deeper etiquette behind all this is covered in our Thai etiquette guide.

Greetings & the everyday basics

The phrases you’ll reach for a dozen times a day. Add krap / ka to the end of any of them to make them polite:

• Hello / goodbye — สวัสดี (sawatdee)
• Thank you — ขอบคุณ (khop khun)
• No worries / you're welcome / it's fine — ไม่เป็นไร (mai pen rai)
• Yes / no (it is / it isn't) — ใช่ / ไม่ใช่ (chai / mai chai)
• Sorry / excuse me — ขอโทษ (kho thot)
• I don't understand — ไม่เข้าใจ (mai khao jai)
• Do you speak English? — พูดอังกฤษได้ไหม (phut angkrit dai mai?)
• Where is the toilet? — ห้องน้ำอยู่ไหน (hong nam yu nai?)

Numbers, money & bargaining

Numbers are the words that pay for themselves fastest. The system is wonderfully regular — once you know one to ten, bigger numbers just stack (yee-sip = 20, yee-sip-et = 21):

• 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 — หนึ่ง สอง สาม สี่ ห้า (nung, song, sam, si, ha)
• 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 — หก เจ็ด แปด เก้า สิบ (hok, jet, paet, kao, sip)
• The digits themselves — ๐ ๑ ๒ ๓ ๔ ๕ ๖ ๗ ๘ ๙ (Thai numerals, zero to nine)
• Hundred / thousand — ร้อย / พัน (roi / phan)
• How much (is it)? — เท่าไหร่ (tao rai?)
• Too expensive — แพงไป (phaeng pai)
• Can you lower the price? — ลดได้ไหม (lot dai mai?)
• The bill, please — คิดเงินด้วย (kit ngern duay)

Bargaining is normal at markets and with taxis that won’t use the meter, but not in malls, supermarkets or 7-Eleven. Knowing the numbers also helps you spot — and politely push back on — the dual-pricing some places quote foreigners.

Taxis, directions & getting around

Even with Grab doing the heavy lifting, a few transport phrases save you constantly:

• To [place], please — ไป...ครับ/ค่ะ (pai ... krap/ka)
• Use the meter, please — เปิดมิเตอร์ด้วย (poet meter duay)
• Go straight — ตรงไป (trong pai)
• Turn left / turn right — เลี้ยวซ้าย / เลี้ยวขวา (liao sai / liao khwa)
• Stop here — จอดตรงนี้ (jot trong nee)
• We've arrived — ถึงแล้ว (thueng laeo)
• Where is [place]? — ...อยู่ไหน (... yu nai?)

For the full how-to on the BTS, MRT, taxis and Grab, see getting around Bangkok.

Food & ordering like a local

Thai food is half the reason people move here, and ordering is where your new words earn their keep:

• I'll have [dish], please — เอา...ครับ/ค่ะ (ao ... krap/ka)
• Delicious — อร่อย (aroi)
• A little spicy / not spicy — เผ็ดน้อย / ไม่เผ็ด (phet noi / mai phet)
• Without [ingredient] — ไม่ใส่... (mai sai ...)
• Vegan / vegetarian — กินเจ / มังสวิรัติ (kin jay / mangsawirat)
• Plain water — น้ำเปล่า (nam plao)
• I'm full — อิ่มแล้ว (im laeo)

Mai phet (“not spicy”) is a phrase to learn on day one — Thai “a little spicy” can still be fierce. Dive deeper in our food & dining guide.

Shopping, errands & your building

The small daily transactions — the convenience store, the laundry, the front desk of your condo:

• Do you have [item]? — มี...ไหม (mee ... mai?)
• This one — อันนี้ (an nee)
• Bag — ถุง (thung)
• Pay cash / bank transfer — จ่ายเงินสด / โอน (jai ngern sot / on)
• Help! (emergency) — ช่วยด้วย (chuay duay!)
• Doctor / hospital — หมอ / โรงพยาบาล (mor / rong phayaban)
• The aircon is broken — แอร์เสีย (air sia)

That last one — reporting something broken — is part of being a good tenant; pair it with the practical script in our tenant rights guide when you need a repair from a landlord.

What do you dial when your Thai runs out

Keep this where you can reach it one-handed. These are the numbers the Royal Thai Government portal publishes, with each service named exactly as the portal names it. The sentence that matters is the one it does not print: nothing on that page says which lines are answered in English, so do not build a plan on that.

Memorise three: 191, 1155 and 1669. The Thai worth practising for that moment is not a sentence — it is your own address, said slowly, plus chuay duay for help and rong phayaban for hospital. Put your building name, soi and district into your phone notes in Thai script tonight; handing a driver or a dispatcher that screen beats pronouncing it under stress.

Apps & tools that do the heavy lifting

You don’t have to choose between learning Thai and getting by today — use both:

• Learning apps: Ling and Drops are built for Thai and teach the script; Pimsleur and ThaiPod101 are strong for listening; Anki (with a Thai deck) wins for long-term memory via spaced repetition.
• Right-now translation: Google Translate’s camera mode reads Thai menus and signs instantly, and its conversation mode handles two-way speech in a pinch.
• The plateau warning: apps are brilliant for phrases, tones and reading reps but stall without speaking. Treat the app as your daily reps and real life as the gym — order in Thai, greet your building staff in Thai, every day.

Should you learn to read the script?

Thai script looks like a wall of loops at first, but it’s alphabetic, not pictographic — each symbol is a sound, so it’s genuinely learnable in a few weeks of focused effort. Whether it’s worth it depends on your plans: if you’re here a year or more, reading opens menus, signs, bus routes and labels, and — the part people underrate — it fixes your tones, because the script encodes them and the official romanisation deliberately does not. If you’re here briefly, romanization plus Google Translate’s camera is plenty. A reasonable middle path: learn the numerals and a dozen common signs (entrance, exit, toilet, push, pull) early, and tackle the full alphabet only once you’ve decided to stay.

Where an ED visa actually gets you, and what it does not

Apps plateau; people don’t. Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Phuket all have long-running Thai language schools, and a real course can support a Non-Immigrant “ED” visa. What that visa is, though, is smaller than most write-ups suggest, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs says so in its own requirements: the visa is “valid for single entry into Thailand and must be used within 90 days from the date of its issuance”, and on arrival you are “granted initial permit to stay in Thailand up to 90 days”. The years people picture come from the next step, not from the visa: “holder of non-immigrant visa (ED) can apply for an extension of stay and multiple reentries permit from the Immigration Bureau”.

How long each of those extensions runs is set by the criteria an Immigration office works to. The English text an Immigration office publishes — Order of the Royal Thai Police No. 777/2551, dated 25 November 2008 — puts it the same way for a government and for a private institution: “Each permission shall be granted for a period certified by the educational institution, which shall not exceed one year.” For a private school it also wants the institution’s operating permission and confirmation from the relevant government agency. A later order is widely said to have replaced 777/2551; we could not retrieve an official English text of that one this run, so take the one-year cap as the shape of the rule and confirm the current order with the office that will stamp your passport.

The single line worth carrying to a school before you pay is the MFA’s document list. It asks for “a copy of the course/program provider’s registration and letter of approval from the relevant service area office under the Ministry of Education”. A school that can genuinely support an ED visa already holds that paper. Ask to see it. A school that cannot produce it is not a school that can get you a visa, whatever its website says.

Then be honest with yourself about what you are signing up for. Enforcement is real: Immigration and the Ministry of Higher Education reported revoking visas for nearly 10,000 students on short-term non-degree programmes after new rules took effect on 14 May 2025. Those rules sit with a different ministry than private language schools do, so that number is not a count of language-school students — but the obligation they name is attendance the institution verifies and reports every month, and the direction of travel is the same. Read our Education (ED) visa guide before enrolling, and the visa hub for the long-stay routes that do not involve a classroom.

Where this fits in settling in

A few words of Thai is one of the cheapest, highest-return things you’ll do as a newcomer — it sits right alongside getting a SIM card, opening a bank account, and working through the first 30 days checklist. It costs little — classes and apps are a small line on the cost of living, and the goodwill it buys is free. Start with four phrases this week, add a situation each week, and within a couple of months you’ll handle taxis, markets and restaurants without thinking. Then find a home in a neighbourhood where you’ll actually use it.

What we could not confirm

Four things on this page were checked this run and came back short. They are listed rather than smoothed over, because a gap you can see is worth more than a number you cannot trust.

• The 80% attendance figure is gone. It was stated twice on this page as a rule. No Thai authority we could reach publishes an attendance percentage for the ED visa, and the MFA requirements set none. What is documented is monthly reporting by the institution, with no threshold attached to it.
• No current Immigration order in English. Order 777/2551 is the education criteria an Immigration office publishes in English, and it dates from 2008. The 2014 order said to have superseded it was not retrievable in an official English text, so this page does not repeat the “cut from five years to one” story usually attached to it.
• No verified tutor or course prices. Private tuition is commonly advertised at a few hundred baht an hour, but we did not verify a single school rate card this run, so no range is printed here as fact. Ask three schools and compare what they put in writing.
• No app assessment. The learning apps named above are the ones expats mention, not products BAANLYY has tested, and app feature lists change faster than we re-check them.

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