How to text a Thai woman when you do not share a language

I have watched a lot of conversations between men in Europe and women who work in Pattaya bars, and most of them die for one reason. Not disinterest. Not distance. The two people cannot read each other, and after a fortnight of guessing they both stop.

Why the phone translator is not enough

She types Thai into a translator, copies the English out, pastes it into the chat. You do the same the other way. Every message is four taps and a copy, and the translation on her side is usually worse than the one on yours, because free translators are tuned for English input. After a week it is a chore, and chores get dropped.

The fix is not a better app on her phone. It is a conversation where the translation happens in the middle, once, in both directions, so she reads Thai on the phone she already uses and you read English on yours.

Three habits that keep it going

• Ask one thing at a time. A translated message with three questions in it comes back with one answer, and the other two are lost. Short messages translate cleanly and get answered.
• Use her nickname, not her legal name. Women who work in Pattaya bars use a working nickname, and it is the only name her friends and her bar know. Writing it is how she knows you remember her.
• Write when she is awake. Thailand is six or seven hours ahead of Europe. A message at your lunchtime lands in her early evening, before her shift, which is when most women answer.

What to expect back

Thai has no tenses the way English does, and it drops pronouns, so a translated reply can read blunt. "Tomorrow work" means she is working tomorrow and would like you to know, not that she is short with you. Read the reply for what it says, not how it sounds.

If you do those three things, the conversation lasts. The men who get answers are not the ones with the best lines. They are the ones whose messages were easy to read.

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