Phom rian ruu paa saa thai mai? Mai chai!

I'm getting pretty familiar with thai now, from hanging with Sing and crew. I can have entire (albeit simple) conversations and people understand. The pronunciation in and of itself is fairly intuitive. The real trick is the tonalities. There are five tones in thai: flat, low, high, rising and falling. It's hard to know how high and low to go without sounding like you're making fun of the language. I can go pretty low you know. Everything said with a rising tone always sounds like a question, no matter what you do. The word for three, saam, always sounds like "three?". No way around it. For the Thais, three will forever be a question without an answer.