richard_smith237

I've encountered the same but realised its often one of or a combination of a couple of points / issues... 1) Pronunciation is slightly off and the listener is an idiot 2) Pronunciation is spot on and the listener is an idiot and hasn’t registered you’re speaking Thai 3) Pronunciation is slightly off and the listener switched on and understands you These are the issues I’ve commonly encountered: 1) At a shopping Mall in Bangkok. Speaking with the Cashier who is looking at me blankly with no concept of what I’m asking, I ask again. The person behind me (a Thai stranger), steps in a says exactly what I have just said. The cashier understands. I thank them, he says he doesn’t know why the cashier didn’t understand. 2) Restaurant, Wife orders in Thai, I completely understand what my Wife has ordered. The wrong food order arrives. There’s a conversation and it turns out the the waiter/waitress didn’t understand my wife correctly (waitress is from a province or neighbouring country). 3) Restaurant, Wife orders in Thai, I completely understand what my Wife has ordered. The wrong food order arrives. The waitress is just an idiot who didn’t remember and didn’t write down the order (we now ask the waitresses to write the order, but many still won’t). 4) A friend is speaking Thai to a staff member (a shop / bar etc) and draws a blank, I repeat what my friend said and staff immediately understands - the difference in accent / pronunciation must be negligible. 5) I’m asking for something and perhaps getting the tone slightly wrong (its an unfamiliar item). I’m drawing a 100% blank from the person I’m asking. I ask another person or member of staff who immediately understands me. 6) Wife and I get in a Taxi... Wife asks the taxi driver to take us to ‘such-a-place'.... Taxi driver repeats with ‘different-place’.... wife says 'such-a-place’ again.... Taxi driver repeats with ‘different-place’ again... I ask and taxi driver understands me !!!.... (had this in reverse plenty of times too). When these issues happen enough it makes me realise that it's not always my Thai pronunciation thats off or poor, rather its that communication is two sided and if the person listening is an idiot its going to be little more difficult...

Is she working at a School here ? Entering visa exempt ?

Please please please can we enter debate about the word ‘Farang’ because that certainly hasn’t been covered before....... https://aseannow.com/topic/464622-farangorigin-and-meaning-of-the-word/ https://aseannow.com/topic/1124445-farang-is-not-impolite-word/page/6/ https://aseannow.com/topic/1036240-is-farang-derogatory/ https://aseannow.com/topic/1257399-why-are-westerners-so-offended-over-the-word-farang-get-over-it/ https://aseannow.com/topic/294348-the-word-farang/page/5/ https://aseannow.com/topic/1083565-how-do-you-spell-farang/page/2/ https://aseannow.com/topic/169391-farang-ki-nok/ https://aseannow.com/topic/720418-whats-the-meaning-of-farang-dong/

You bad boy... You stole billions.... you’re fired you can’t do that any more.... ok, ok, before LL gets all over this there is no accusation of theft... but still... Isn’t anyone in Thailand in a position of influence unusually wealthy ?.... thats the whole idea here isn’t it ?

I think so too..... We used to be able to get a speed boat directly to our designated beach / resort. Now the hotels only offer a speed-boat to Na Dan Pier (from Ban Pae). This was set up as a Covid-19 measure, but it appears to be a continued legacy. Maybe until Emergency Decree is dropped, who knows, but the main ‘arrival pier’ at Na Dan is a newer permanent fixture through which everyone entering the island is channeled and pays the National Park fees.

Immigration Health Surcharge is £624 (about 26,000 baht) per year and the NHS can be used. It would take about 5 years for my Wife to get a UK passport. The Life in the UK test (or whatever its called) is not easy but can be studied for. I’m sure fluency in English helps a lot.

Are you talking about deputy PM Anutin? And disbarred PM Prayut? Whom have both publicly called white foreigners 'farang'. The term ‘connected’ may be better used to describe these men rather than educated in such circumstances when evaluating their merit achievements vs education... That said, Anutin is by no means poorly educated, from wealthy parents he attended a private university in New York and also Thammarsat.... He did use the word ‘Farang’ in one (or more) of his famous announcements and that was widely criticised as ‘clumsy’.... hubris.. In general, when meeting with, discussing with, socialising with well educated Thai’s with whom it would be easy to associate an element of class the term ‘Farang’ is unlikely to surface at least until a friendly familiarity and closeness is achieved combined with a non-formal settings.

Has this guy got a nick name yet...???..... Like ‘Big Puddin’ or something similar ?

I think this is offensive to Fortuner drivers nationwide... I did see one indicate once

Its common sense to know that motorbikes are dangerous . You don't need to be taught things like that YOU and I don’t need to be taught things like this... but you’ve still over simplified the point. Many parents are very poorly educated, they won’t think twice about their child riding a motorcycle at 12 or 13 years old because thats what they all do. Its the norm, they won’t second guess this... So.. many of these parents need help from those who do know better... They need to be taught for themselves and their children that riding without a helmet is more dangerous, riding with one hand is dangerous, riding while using the phone is dangerous, going through red lights, going through cross roads, pulling out without looking etc etc.... There is a lot which can be taught much of which to you and I is simply common sense......

But this ‘ideology’ we all have is a somewhat over simplified dumbing down of the issue at hand. Why don’t the police do their job properly in the first place ? They’re not paid enough ? Why not ? not enough government funds ? no enough tax paid ? Government buying Submarines ? Or... can’t do there job as locals will rise up and complain at police stations ? It will cause bad publicity, station bosses will be told to calm down their efforts ? Once the surface is scratched... How would any of us deal with these issues ? We’d fail pretty quickly... How would we get 230,000 police officers across the nation to change their attitudes over night ? Ultimately, there needs to be a whole cultural shift towards road safety... If the nation could somehow be convinced they’d catch Covid-19 by driving / riding poorly the death toll and accident rate would plummet....

It is for this reason that I sometimes see my attempts at communication with waitresses returning the wrong item !! Quite long ago I realised it wasn’t a case of my poor Thai, it was a case that the person with whom I am speaking is not a ‘central Thai speaker, they are from Isaan, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam etc and their Thai is about as good as mine.... (or worse). I also realised that when ordering, my Wife also encounters exactly the same issues and the order which I perfectly understood was obviously not understood by the waitress. When I (we) ask the waitress to repeat our order we hear the different accent, identify the difference and ask for conformation of the order.. At this stage we realise we are dealing with someone who can hardly understand us or someone who was hardly listening in the first place and wrote down or remembered what they thought we wanted, not what we had actually ordered. I suspect this puts some foreigners off trying to communicate in Thai. In busier tourist areas, particularly Phuket, I have found that sticking to English keeps things much simpler, my Wife even orders in English now in such areas... its just easier all around unless we are dealing with someone who presents as ’switched on’ and isn’t going to allowed their ears to be fooled by their eyes !...

Which one is it ??... no one was pointing...

Oh no.... here we go again....

How can you blame the parents if they themselves have no idea its dangerous. I agree... Given the parents the education so they can make informed decisions. Teach todays parents and children about road safety.... Todays Children will be tomorrow’s parents who can then pass on that knowledge of road safety along with continued education and TV campaigns etc... When nothing is done, when there are no attempts to educate people its unfair to blame the uneducated.... Should parents be self taught about road safety ?... perhaps they are more mature and know a little more, but do they really ??? What about TV campaigns at prime time.. i.e. 1 min at each commercial break on TV... just a start. Education reform - insist schools teach children road safety. We may not stop 15 year olds riding bikes - we can teach them to do so more safety. We may not stop 13 and 14 year olds riding bikes, but we can do more to stop them and / or teach them to ride more carefully and safety. We will not stop every incident, but inroads can be made to make improvements.

The issue of course is that when the child's motorcycle is confiscated Somchai complains to Nattawut the PhuYai Baan and they go to the Police station together.... Nattawut points out how the child can no longer get to school.... the police conceded and return the bike... This happens over and over again, so often that the police ultimately give up..... .... Somchai's child and 2 others die 4 weeks later when they hit a lorry at a cross roads..... Somchai, Nattawut and society in general complain to the Police that they didn’t do enough to stop under-age children riding motorcycle.... We read the report on Asean-now... ’Netizens upset as another 3 school children killed on Thai roads’...

I'm not so sure... Around March we will see some prominent police force figure announced that people cannot ride in the flat-bed of a pickup.... those who do will be charged. There will be public outcry, someone else in the police force will overturn the decision / announcement and announced that its ok, for now... Notice how its all gone very quiet about the ’seatbelt law’ (seatbelts in all back seats)... ??? what about those in the flat bed pick-ups ??... Its too much hassle, too many people complain. So what happens.... The laws are in place... but people are not stopped from braking them. But, when they do and people get upset, the response is ’there was a law’....

They're doing what the public want them to do. They applaud giving kids jumping jacks and press-ups instead of fines and motorcycle confiscation. If they started arresting kids and parents and crushing their bikes, the public would soon kick up a fuss and say it's too harsh. Agree with both comments... The Police enable these incidents through lack of enforcement. The Police are apathetic towards enforcement because it takes too much effort and causes too much conflict.

But ultimately, IF you do all that and then come to a stop and the person riding towards you has still not noticed and hit you.... well... then what ???? These incidents will always happen - but they happen more frequently in Thailand because there are so many motorcyclists, so many without helmets, so many young, so many who are not trained, parents don’t understand safety or pass it on to their children, police don’t enforce safety, the general attitudes towards safety are extremely slack.... so many factors... But to add to your ‘if I was faced with’ comment... I have been faced with.... I family (of 3) riding down the pavement.. swerved off the pavement onto the main road along which I was riding my motorcycle, and road straight towards me... I stopped and hit my horn, I couldn’t swerve because I hadn’t checked my blindspot recently and didn’t want to get cleaned out by passing vehicle..... Of course, this was all my fault... the rider of the motorcycle an apparent father of one and husband of another looked at me quite angrily.... I clearly should not have been riding in the correct direction on the correct side of the road !!!!.... He possibly never realised what he did was wrong or dangerous, he has probability risked the lives of is wife and child numerous times since...... Sadly, there are simply so many on the roads who are not trained or educated.... this costs lives of many innocents. The one single thing that nearly every School child will grow up and do is use their own transport, in Thailand, the UK or any other nation. This absence of road safety awareness is a huge failing in so many societies. Why aren’t children taught about road safety here in Thailand ? why aren’t they in the UK ??? Learning to drive / ride safety is far far more useful to any person as a life skill than being able to draw a flower etc... I’m not suggesting ‘life skills (including driving / riding) should replace other subjects, but it most certainly should be in every curriculum globe wide.

Its not a private drive way. While the land on which a supermarket is placed may be privately owned, it is a public space, in this case this was a public-road.

Exactly that, its quick and easy.... (this is how we make transfers etc.. when owing others or receiving money for football subs / games etc).... BUT... sometimes when the other party receives the QR Code Image their phone doesn’t recognise it as a QR code and they are stuck in the situation of ‘having a QR Code, but not being able to scan it on their Phone Banking App’..... This is usually an issue with how tech savvy the other party is. Our phone banking Apps are able to select an ‘image’ (i.e. the image of the QR code we have just received)... but some people don’t know this so get stuck... its a not really a steep learning curve, its just developing tech. The other option of course is ‘PromptPay’ which is very simple and simple involves knowing the other parties phone number.

Anyone with a 200 Thai word vocabulary already has a 1000 word vocabulary, they just have to work on the tone !!!! ????

Some valid points here.... With anything I consider wholly important.... i.e. seeking a medical opinion etc I will only converse with a doctor whose English is excellent, my Thai may never be good enough for that.... A plateau has been reached whereby significant effort needs to be made to step beyond 'conversation-casual’ to ‘professional business’... and when dealing with anything or anyone at a ‘professional business’ level their English is usually fluent. The exception here would be dealing with the police - but at a checkpoint etc my Thai is good enough to argue, object to their BS etc !! (although getting stopped is a very rare occasion these days). That said, there are so many times when speaking with local labourers, the Amphur office staff, the local juristic staff, security guards, delivery staff, etc etc is all useful....

Why would you want to converse with a Thai that probably left school at age 12. They don't know anything, they've never been anywhere, their IQ is 10 points below ours ........ 'this food is very spicy' is about as interesting as a conversation with a Thai can get. Thats your projection and perhaps a facet of the life you live and the circles within which you mix (or rather don’t mix). There are plenty of people to speak Thai with, from the very simple conversations with the local noodle seller or taxi driver... yes, about spicy food or the weather etc.... to more in-depth conversations about family life, friends, visiting places, to football debates etc with guys I play football with, or guys in other teams I play against in tournaments etc (football usually ends up with a few beers after)....

Japan... Awesome... You can stay in a Ryokan near Mt Fuju..... Bullet Train to various other cities including Kyoto Explore Tokyo, interesting streets and cafe’s... to temples. Some good museums (unfortunately TeamLab Borderless is closing this month). The Crazyness of Harajuku (Take<deleted>a st) and Shinjuku... Outside of Thailand I think Japan is one of the best food destinations in the world... just rocking up to any hole in the wall foodshop or walking into any restaurant and blindly ordering returns some outstanding experiences....