This paper presents the results of a contrastive study of grammatical categories expressing temporality and modality through verb forms in German and Thai. In order to discover systematic uses of pre- and postverbal temporal and modal markers in Thai in relation to the German tense and modality system, I analyzed the first German-Thai bidirectional corpus consisting of contemporary German and Thai short stories and their translations into the other language. Although German and Thai express temporality differently, certain conceptual relationships between German tenses and Thai aspects can be identified. In terms of modality, Thai has grammaticalized two different sets of modal verbs providing either deontic or epistemic meanings but has not developed any markers equivalent to the German subjunctive mood.