Nastassja Riemermann (tsukikage85) wrote in linguaphiles,
Nastassja Riemermann
tsukikage85
linguaphiles

Wishing I spoke some Thai...

I've recently started volunteer work teaching ESL to adults, and my class is the beginning class. One of my students is from Thailand, and she's been working on arithmetic on the side, mainly by working on worksheets on long division and multiplication, as well as some addition and subtraction. As there's some English -> Thai translations on the back of one of these worksheets, I'm assuming she's literate in Thai, although I suppose it's possible that the teacher who prepared these worksheets for her wrote them, and she's not actually literate. In any case, a lot of the answers she gives are really close, but at the same time very wrong (52022/8=652.6). Unfortunately, she apparently either mainly does the problems in her head, or does them on a separate sheet of paper and then copies the answers over. I did ask her to do a multi-digit multiplication problem on paper for me, but I noticed that she never did any carrying of digits on paper, which is fine for those who are used to multiplication, but especially for a beginner can lead to errors. In all honesty, I almost wonder if she isn't thoroughly aware that these numbers need to be carried.
So, my actual question is three-fold. With the assumption that this person may have never been formally taught arithmetic, and (depending on how politeness is linguistically encoded) that she is much older than I am, how would you say/write the following in Thai:
- Please show your work (do your work on this paper?) so I can see where you are making mistakes.
- It might help you to not make mistakes if you write down the numbers you are carrying. (I'm not even sure how to break down "to carry a number" into non-jargon in English...)
Finally, while I'm at it, are any of you familiar with online arithmetic explanations written in Thai? Or ones that are thorough yet not language-dependent?
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