Zooheekock

The perennial problem with these types of threads is that everyone has different standards. What is fluency? What is 'really speaking Thai'? You need to look at standardized measures, like the CEFR levels. You might say fluency is at B2 (which is upper intermediate or, for the British, a good grade at A level). At that level you can do pretty much everything you need to do and you can engage in general conversations which don't require super-specialized vocabulary. C1 is more like degree-level proficiency in a foreign language and C2 is near-native (on IELTS I think it's 8-9). Not many are going to reach those dizzy heights but if fluency is at B2/B2+ then there are a fair few people at that level, maybe less so with writing but with the other skills they are around. One thing is that these are fairly self-selecting groups - if you're not the kind of person who is going to devote the time required to get your Thai to that level, you are unlikely to meet many people who are.

I'm able to read books written in a casual style. I'd put my Thai at around intermediate level, I guess. However, the number of foreigners who can do the following is likely quite low:

-read academic text

-understand rachasap

-fluently discuss technical problems

-give a speech using rhetorical thai

-speak with monks using ecclesiastical thai

-use idioms properly in everyday speech

-make puns

-read/write poetry

etc.

It's very unlikely anyone is going to have interests which encompass all of those but I can do some. I read academic stuff in subject areas where I'm interested and I'm learning rachasap at the moment but I doubt I'll ever be a great poem reader and my ability to read vastly outruns my ability to discuss (in writing or speech) what I have read.

There's a review of this (and some other teach yourself to read Thai packages) on the A Woman Learning Thai website. (I won't put a link in because they always seem to get removed but Google will reveal all.)

To come here on a supposedly "GAY FORUM", and find that tolerated is not acceptable to me.

Got to agree with this. Posters get told off for using the wrong font or crappy punctuation but trolling a gay sub-forum is allowed? <deleted> to that.

Propaganda nonsense post has been removed as well.

This thread - and to a large extent, this entire forum - is propaganda nonsense. I look forward to its immediate removal.

Perhaps ginjag's deranged, hateful and profoundly stupid posts can be merged with the what-Thais-hate-about-foreigners thread. That would seem to be their natural home.

what credentials did they have

Do schools no longer exist? They had their electoral mandate.

You and your elk

Elk? I guess that answers my first question.

The mere fact that one of the most important, dynamic, trendy, profitable, and successful companies in the world has been run by an OUT AND PROUD gay man could definitely be seen by the haters as gay propaganda.

It's also a company which is very easily to hate. For me, this is good news, despite his involvement in Apple. I think it's great that this has happened, but it would be even better if it were a more mainstream company. Something well known but boring and mundane without any particular image, and not something which presents itself as being so cutting-edge. Something like UPS or Boeing or Johnson and Johnson or Nestle. It might not be quite such a big news item but Apple and the other tech companies are special cases and it's still a little ghettoized and a bit show-bizzy.

Well, whether or not you benefit from some individual act of corruption is not really the point. And nor is the fact that the vast institutional corruption of western nations goes almost entirely unnoticed. Ultimately, corruption imposes losses on society as a whole and we all have to carry the costs of that. Yes, you can pay off the cop for some traffic violation but a country which has a properly functioning legal system is vastly preferable - to you as well as to me - to one which allows you to get away with what you can pay to get away with.

If I change the letter order of Thai words or start writing words vertically or in anti-clockwise circles or whatever else, they become hard to read. This shows that you learn to read a language in a certain way, not that any one way of writing is preferable to another.

the combination of sometimes right-to-left token combinations and no spacing makes it unnecessarily hard to read for a novice.

It might do, it might not. It's something which you would have to do detailed research on, and it's certainly not something which is self-evidently true.

the problem here is obviously getting from novice to being experienced.

Well, a slightly more sensible way of dealing with that is to change the way literacy skills are developed, rather than engaging in fanciful plans to change the language's orthography (which, as reader of Thai, I don't have any great problems with). Besides, it's not really clear from the OP exactly what the problems are. Do children just not want to read or is it that they are incapable of reading? Is this a realistic test or were the kids presented with some deadly dull text which nobody would want to read? Was it even a test which could realistically be said to assess reading? Likewise with the writing. Is it just that kids used forum slang instead of formal language? Testing is difficult at the best of times but in Thailand, it's just atrociously awful so I wouldn't put too much weight on this without knowing a little more about it.

Quote: That is corruption that benefits all.

Beggars belief!!

With this mindset, what chance is there, really??

It benefits all involved in the transaction, which is presumably what he meant.

Do you think he actually believes this horseshat that he spouts?

Sadly, yes. I'm pretty sure that the army really do think that they are saving the nation, just like the PDRC really did think that the D in their name belonged there and hadn't just got lost on the way home from the pub and wandered into their organization entirely by accident. It's a lot easier to tell lies which you really believe are true than to tell lies which you know are false. And it's an unfortunate feature of human psychology that it's not that hard to convince yourself that a lie is true, especially when you make certain that it's impossible for you to hear any dissenting voices.

there are some quite brilliantly educated "rig pigs" as I'm sure there are taxi drivers out there

No doubt but they are not often found among the white immigrants who wash ashore in Thailand, who are, collectively, a truly awful collection of people. Really. What a depressingly stupid, ignorant, offensive, arrogant, blundering collection of oafs. Is there a group of people on the planet whose self-image is so at odds with reality? Surely not. So in answer to the OP, whatever it is, it's not enough.

gays who insist on proclaiming their sexual identity from the rooftops are simply irritating and do nothing to advance the just cause of equal treatment for gays

Tim Cook made an announcement about his sexuality. That is not "proclaiming his sexual identity from the rooftops" and if you find what he said irritating, you are probably less committed to "the just cause of equal treatment for gays" than you imagine.

There in lies the out of box innovative cultural thinking

This is a perfect example of what makes people like me want to shoot anyone who buys Apple products. Innovative cultural thinking is what James Joyce and Arnold Schoenberg did. It's not what Steve Jobs did.

Just make english an official language (yes I know not likely to happen)- the language of business and technology

How is that going to help? 1/3 of the population don't have high levels of literacy in their mother tongue so let's add a language which virtually nobody knows beyond the most basic level. Great idea.

PM urges public to watch out for corruption and to report to government

Presumably, so they can check that the army are getting their piece of the action.

Well, now he mentions it, I'm wondering where Prayuth's assets of 102 million baht (plus, of course, the 268 million he transferred to his father and siblings and the further 198 million he transferred to his children) came from.

Perhaps one shouldn't be cynical. Who knows. It could all be the result of just having a very good savings plan. If so, maybe he could share some his financial secrets with the nation in his Friday chats.

^ Unless you've got some kind of age-related cognitive impairment, being 66 is just not that relevant here. Well done for learning the alphabet - and, yes, that's much more than most manage - but a year just is a long time to get there. I think a month (if you don't hurry) should be long enough to recognize the letters and make some kind of (moderately successful) attempt at reading simple, regular words. And this is not about being a genius. It's just a matter of application. You could do it in a week, if you got your head down.

In reply to the OP, I'm assuming that this is a question about the alphabet/reading course, rather than the Skype lessons. If it is, I haven't done it so I can't say. However, if you have some motivation and a few people to ask for help, it is entirely possible to teach yourself the alphabet in a short period of time and to do so without any great difficulty. I generally don't like paying people to do things which I can easily do myself and associating particular sounds with particular symbols and then moving on to the various algorithms for working out the tones (which I presume is what he covers in the 10 hours) is just that. It's an entirely mechanical, unambiguous task so I would look at that and think that having a teacher present the information has no advantages over any other method; I would imagine that you have to go no further than wikipedia for most of this. This is a bit different to working on the pronunciation of some of the more difficult sounds (and of course the tones), where a teacher would help but you're not going to get that in 10 hours of a computer-based course. Other people, however, feel differently so it's more a question of your feelings and how happy you are to be self-directed in your learning.

Yet another critic without a reasonable workable alternative!

you have no solution

I have plenty of ideas, none of which (for obvious reasons) I have bothered to repeat here but, if it makes you happy, and it's certainly in keeping with the bovine stupidity endemic on this forum, you go right ahead and imagine whatever you like about me.

Prayuth, and the junta generally, are there to preserve the status quo, to at least partly disenfranchise the population, and to manage whatever changes may be soon be here in the terms of state arrangements. They're just not really that interested in all this other stuff. Sure, Prayuth will mouth off about how this or that is a problem and before everyone forgets what the problem du jour is, some mildly reformist moves may be made but one of the primary interests of these guys is in having a strong, top-down state which is able to keep everyone in their place and that requires the police so they're not about to do anything too dramatic.

"They proved over several months they were incapable and/or unwilling to stop attacks and murders of their opponents."

Well, they tried far too hard to accommodate the PDRC and their attacks on democracy, that's true. As things turned out, the softy-softy approach was, whilst dignified, a disaster. How far the attacks on the PDRC were carried out by agents provocateurs is unclear, though there was certainly involvement of the military in the demonstrations. Of course, whether people have a right to agitate for the overthrow of a democratic government is seriously questionable. Democracies are under no obligation to tolerate open threats to their own existence and had it not been for the fact that the Thai courts have been entirely captured by sectional interests, the police would have been much better equipped to deal with things.

"They acted illegally, breached parliamentary rules, and tried to sneak through an amnesty bill which outraged many sections of the Thai community."

The amnesty bill was overturned by street protests. If anything, responsiveness to this kind of extra-parliamentary pressure is one indication of a government acting democratically. As for the illegality thing (I presume you mean the amendments to the senate), the court judgement was ludicrous, as was pretty widely recognized at the time.

"The situation was spiraling out of control and being inflamed by the caretaker government's treasonable incitement of civil unrest "

This is nonsense. Suthep and co, with the support of members of the current junta, were openly agitating for the violent overthrow of the government. In response, Yingluck was a model of restraint.

"including "beating the war drum" meetings and calls for the establishment of their own republic."

Utter rubbish. A couple of signs went up in the North and there were a few Facebook posts and the rest was the work of army PR and Prayuth's over-sized mouth.

"You can't carry out a peaceful coup unless the majority of the people are behind it."

You must be completely deranged even to even begin to claim that "the majority of the people are behind" the coup. Just utterly, utterly absurd. That's a fantastically stupid comment.

Plus, according to Suthep, plotting for the coup started with the army many years ago and, of course, there's the rather inconvenient fact that Anupong and Prawit were key supporters of the PDRC (key members of which are now playing their part in the disenfranchisement of the Thai people) so the idea that this was all just an unfortunate and unwanted response to events which had nothing to do with the army is a total fiction.

Oh really? When was the trial, must have missed that one.

Going to have to give that one a failing mark, I'm afraid. If I kill someone, I am guilty of murder, whether or not I stand trial for it. 'Guilty' can, in addition to meaning 'having committed or being responsible for a wrongful act', obviously also mean something like 'found to have committed an illegal act by a court of law' but it doesn't exclusively mean the latter so only 2/10 for your efforts. Sorry.

^^^ What do you think the overthrow of your own government is, if not treason? Perhaps you are not a native speaker of English but that's just what treason means and unarguably that is what Prayuth (and others) did. Hence, he is guilty of treason. As for its being a capital crime, check article 113 of the legal code - using violence or the threat of violence to overthrow the government or to change the constitution is punishable by death. Perhaps you didn't know this but if so, you would be wise to keep your ignorance a little more in mind whilst you post.

This would applie to a decent honest government, democratically elected and democratically and transparent acting.

Overthrowing a government which is neither democratically elected (spare me the details, it was obvious) nor acting democratically in favour of the people

but only in favour of their own pockets

is not treason because it is in favour for the people and justice.

Don't have most if not all democracies come from some kind of "treason"?

French Revolution e.g.

Destroy what destroys you (or your country which includes you) is ethical.

I see I've met one of the forum high-flyers. Where did you do your doctoral work in SE Asian studies?

^^^ What do you think the overthrow of your own government is, if not treason? Perhaps you are not a native speaker of English but that's just what treason means and unarguably that is what Prayuth (and others) did. Hence, he is guilty of treason. As for its being a capital crime, check article 113 of the legal code - using violence or the threat of violence to overthrow the government or to change the constitution is punishable by death. Perhaps you didn't know this but if so, you would be wise to keep your ignorance a little more in mind whilst you post.

Check again yourself... article 113 excludes the armed forces from this law.

Do you have a link which confirms this? It seems I'm not allowed to quote the text itself, but the criminal code does not say that.