This can be considered a throw away post, but I thought someone might find it useful. On Saturday, I had an inspection for a Vietnamese client. After we had finished going over the report, I said thank you in Vietnamese, and she smiled broadly. How did you know to say that?! She exclaimed. My son and I will always ask people how to say thank you in their native tongue, and we try to remember it then. We are not always successful (Turkish has two forms for our thank you, and I still do not remember either one), but it is a simple way to let a person know that you appreciated them. After having to deliver an inspection report in Spanish today, my thoughts were directed once more to making a connection with my clients.

Houston has a quite a few different ethnic groups, and I would not be able to include them all with my limited knowledge, so I want to give you a few ways to say thank you, so you can make your own connections. I will spell them out as they sound to English ears. Spanish is the most known: grah-see-ahs. We are having more Vietnamese immigrants to our city, and their phrase sounds like gum on. The Chinese are next with shay-shay. If you are feeling adventurous, you can say nee how mah, which is Chinese for hello and how are you?

We have been having more Arab speakers enter our community, so you can say shook ron. However they may speak Persian, which is similar to French in its thank you: mare-see. Now, if you meet anyone who speaks the ancient tongue of Sanskrit, you can say dahnk ah, which also happens to be the same in German.

Alright, it was a quick tour. I still have to learn to remember the Urdu version of thank you, but with so many languages being spoken in India, I think that I can stick with thank you. Well, thank you for reading this post.