When you’re out and about in Thailand buying things, the shopkeepers will invariable show you their price (in Thai baht) by pulling out a calculator and showing you the screen with the price.
What if you want a lower price? Or when you’re negotiating the fare with taxi drivers or tuktuk drivers, how do you know what they’re saying and how do you offer a counter-proposal?
The answer is, you need to know how to express numbers in spoken Thai.
Fortunately, it’s very easy, thanks to a mnemonic device that helps you remember all the Thai numbers.
To help you remember, here’s a short story.
One day at noon, a song is sung by a herder named Sam as he sees the number 56 on a jet at the airport across from the pond where his pet cows sip water. So . . .
- Noon
- Song
- Sam
- See
- Ha
- Hok (rhymes with joke)
- Jet,
- Pet
- Cow (sometimes pronounced Gow)
- Sip
The part of this that’s tricky to remember is that two numbers right together begin with the ‘H’ sound. Ha is the number 5, and Hok is 6. That can be confusing. Here’s something that will help you remember the difference.
On their cell phones, Thai teens don’t text LOL (laugh out loud), they write 555 (Ha Ha Ha).
OK, so let’s put this in practice. How would you say thirty six? It’s easy. That’s three tens plus six. So you’d say ‘Sam Sip Hok’.
The other key things to know is that the word for a hundred is ‘loi’.
So two hundred forty nine is
Sam loi see sip cow.
And if a tuktuk driver tells you a 5 minute trip will cost you ‘loi baht’, you say, “No, no. no. Ha sip baht.” If he isn’t too busy and likes your smile, he’ll come back with ‘Pet sip baht’. To which you reply ‘Hok sip ha baht.” And you finally settle on jet sip baht – 70.
By the way, a thousand is Pan.
So what if somebody quoted you Pan Loi Baht?
That’s 1,100.
And here are the few curve balls. For some reason the number 20 is pronounced ee-sip (you’d think it would be song sip). And 21 is ee-sip et (not ee-sip noon). And 31 is sam sip et.
And finally, the number zero is ‘sun’. Which is easy, because the sun is round, just like a zero.
Have fun negotiating.