Friends and Dining Abroad

On my main blog, I built (for the sake of building) a Page of naive but well-intentioned tips for traveling throughout SE Asia. I did the best I could with it, attempting to show how to say three important and handy phrases for wherever they go: hello, thank you, and (very) delicious. Using even this little of the language will put you on people's good side and make your interactions more positive, as folks living overseas are used to tourists blowing through their proud nation and not making any effort to learn their language.

On Postcrossing, I listed in my profile that I'd like to learn these phrases from other nations—when people send me postcards, they come from all nations around the globe—and many senders have been nicely compliant with this request. Here's a summary of what I've got so far:

	Hello	Thank You	(Very) Delicious
Afrikaans	Hallo	Dankie	Baie lekker
Belorussian	Prevet Dzen dobry Priviatanie	Dzjakuju Dziyakuy	Velmi smachna Smachno
Chinese	Ni hao	Hsieh hsieh Xie xie	(Chang) Hao chih
Chuvash	Ira kun pultar	Tavta pus	Pite tutla
Czech	Ahoj	Děkuji	Velmi chutné
Dutch	Hallo Hoi	Dank je wel	Heel (erg) lekker
Finnish	Hei	Kiitos	Erittäin herkullista
French	Bonjour	Merci	Trés bon Délicieux
German	Hallo	Vielen dank	Sehr lecker
Bahasa Indonesia	Selamat pagi (morning) Selamat siang (afternoon) Selamat sore (evening) Selamat malan (night)	Terima kasi (banyak)	Enak (sekali)
Japanese	Ohayo gozaimasu (morning) Konnichi-wa (day) Konban-wa (evening)	Arigato (gozaimasu - polite)	Totemo oishii desu
Khmer	Sua s'dei	Au kun	Ch'ngain
Lao	Sabaidee	Kop jai	Siep (lai-lai)
Latvian	Sveiki	Paldies	Garshigs
Lithuanian	Labas	Ačiū	(Labai) skanu
Maori	Tēnā koe Kia ora (casual)	Tēnā rawa utu koe	Kakato
Russian	Privet Zdravstvuyte (polite)	Spasibo	Ochen vkusno
Spanish	Hola	Grácias	Molt bo
Taiwanese	Li hou	Lou hsia	Hou chia
Thai	Sawatdee men add "krop" women add "ka"	Korp kun krop/ka	Aroi (maak)
Vietnamese	Xin chao	Cảm ơn	Ngon wa

While they detest hearing it, you can speak Bahasa Malaysia or Singapore by referring to Bahasa Indonesia (with some regional differences). And I added a link to Chuvash since not many people seem to know what that means.

The variations in these answers come, of course, from various regions, various learners of each language, the vagaries of transliteration, and perhaps some discrepancies in handwriting. For instance, I was not able to transliterate the Cyrillic or Kanji hands or replicate them here, but I thought they were awesome nonetheless.

I'm delighted that so many people were so helpful in providing their tongue's phrases for me! I received many contributions for Dutch, Russian, and Chinese, but as one French writer pointed out, there wasn't any French listed (I added that later, on my own). But then, she didn't provide the translation either.