Jpoplover

Pure comedy, almost as bad as the old queensland cops song a while ago

Wow, lots of information, thanks people, guess I need ot look into this a bit deeper. I hope to budget about 100k for accommodation for the month, my last stay was at the Royal River Hotel, nice enough hotel howeevr i'd prefer to be closer to the main area's, like sukhamvit (close enough spelling for a foreigner ) 1-10 at most i guess.

Thanks again people.

Hiya's

Heading this way again for about 2-4 weeks, looking for furnished apartment with high speed internet in Bkk, easy access to metro etc, any idea what i can expect to pay?

Thanks

If like any other media release, there's more to this story than meets the eye. Congrats to the authorities for ge"getting their man", and condolences for the family of the lady.

Only in the LOS eh?

Save the tax payer and waste a perfectly good bullet on scum like that, just saying

Honestly, if you really want to see what going over the top for a music video really is, search for Rammstein's "Pussy" video clip, NO, it is not on you tube, you'll need ot find it from an adult site, cos its that explicit, funny song tho

However, even Duran Duran back in the 80's had Girls on Film, Falco had a few, as did many other bands, girls in bikini's dancing around like its feeding time at mcdonalds?, bah, not even close to racy (cute however).

Perfectly harmless anywhere else but not catholic stronghold Thailand, oh wait .....lulz

Smoke and mirrors, you tube has far worse.

Work on human traficing = good on ya, about dam_n time, work on underage sex workers = good to hear it.

Stamp out prostitution?, never gonna happen, however if you legalised it, it could be controlled. Even in a 3rd world country such as New Zealand, it is legal and controlled and very very few issues.

As long as the bums in parliament and other civic people are involved in it, it's not gonna go away.

people do have some strange beliefs, commonplace the world over, look, listen and forget, just smile along with them

just wow, this is getting funnier and funnier, bring on more sillyness that monty python would laugh at.

The most useful move that the education system could make would be to Romanise the Thai alphabet, this is the biggest obstacle to learning English, and conversely for foreigners learning Thai. Just look at how Turkey emerged from the Middle Ages when it converted from Arabic to Roman.

As to unqualified but native speakers, these can do an adequate job if the department also contains enough qualified and experienced teachers to provide guidance. At the moment it is often the one eyed leading the blind.

I'm not a fan of the romanization at all. Even though it occurred for several south-east asian languages (Vietnamese and Malay come to mind), I believe it permanently alters and distort the language. It also smells vaguely colonial...

At least, Thais are fortunate enough to have an alphabet, unlike Chinese.

I find "it's vaguely colonial" a rather weak argument, then again, to be fair, so is the notion that the language reform in Turkey was the particular catalyst that brought about rapid modernization - in fact the language reform was only one small part of a much broader policy attempting to modernize the country - correlation does not equal causation.

Could you be more specific about how Vietnamese and Malay have been permanently distorted and altered since adopting Roman letters, please? Language change is an ever-occurring phenomenon and the chief reason (apart from group identification) why there are different languages in the first place. The nature of change reflects the environment the language and people navigate in - hence Thai has a huge number of English loan words (many of which do not sound the same as in English, nor mean the same thing) that occur spontaneously, a large scientific vocabulary that is mostly Indic-based, mostly introduced by decree, and a language seen as more sophisticated which mostly consists of Khmer loan words.

The Thai alphabet is very beautiful and serves its purpose reasonably well, but there are a number of niggles. It uses a system that is unnecessarily involved for conveying one and the same tone. Having several letters to represent the same sound is also a hurdle to spelling (let's not get into the inconsistencies of spelling in European languages, especially English, here - I am aware of them, but there are many European languages that are not burdened with those problems - Italian, Spanish, Finnish, etc.).

Malay was written with Arabic letters before, and that writing system was not specifically designed for conveying Malay either... And if you want to go far enough back, the Thai writing system builds upon the Indic scripts, which were originally designed for non-tonal languages very different from the local language here. These things do change over time, it is natural and it makes life easier for people. Nostalgia and nationalism are also fairly natural, I suppose, but they tend to lose.

Thai texts require slightly more effort to read than a text written with Roman letters because of punctuation rules. Of course, for an educated native speaker, most words will be known beforehand, but for less educated Thais and for those learning it as a second language, a simple reform like introducing spaces between words would help a lot. I've learned to read Thai quite well, but this is a hurdle for advanced texts that really does not need to be there. Also, the tone formation rules needlessly complex, and could be made easier by reform.

Pinyin for writing Mandarin really is a great system and Thailand would not suffer at all from introducing a similar standard and actually implementing and following it.

Now here's the funny thing, I educate people in NZ from asian countries about english, sure we do not practice to TESOL standards, most of my work involves pronounciation (conversational english - after all if they cannot hold a intelligable conversation, the whole thing becomes a waste of time), as I feel most of the english requirements are at a too high level for most native speakers to get right.

I would love to educate in Thailand, and teach if I really had to, beware however I only have a masters degree in computer science and did do a couple of pedagogy papers to get a grasp of educating.

My 5 Bahts worth

I'd love to go on any of these rides, but alas i'll be in Singapore that week playing on my baby zzr400, so prolly a tad small

Best of guys, and watch out for those damned "improvised road repairs", aka pot holes