Artful Dodger

I am going to be in Hanoi for a while and my Thai girlfriend will be coming out to stay with me for a week. I would like to try and head off any trouble at the airport, bearing in mind she is in her 20s and will be on her own. She has confirmation of her return flight as well as a copy of the accommodation booking showing her name and the dates when she will be there. Is there anything else I could / should do?

Thanks

I am in Thailand at the moment on an SETV which expires shortly. I'd planned to be away for a few months but things have changed and I now want to stay until say March.

I could go home and get an METV but it's expensive. Otherwise I can do two more SETVs or an Ed visa. If I go the Ed visa route, I am going to be stuck waiting somewhere else for maybe a month while the docs are processed, plus I would be signing up for a six month course starting in say November, which means I would be leaving well before the end. I would be doing some Thai classes even if I came back on an SETV, but not as many as I would have to do with the Ed visa.

What are the odds of being refused two more SETVs? I would say my record is pretty clean so far. I have always come in on the visa exempt stamp and have never reentered within 3 months.

My plan after that is to get METVs until retirement age, or an elite card if I am refused an METV much before 50. Does three back-to-back SETVs look much worse than one SETV and an Ed visa for a course I didn't see through?

Thanks

4 minutes ago, transam said:

Well near everything is different in LOS to England...

Fair enough. I think there is usually a reason for the differences, though, and I can't see one here. But it's speculation really so I will shut up.

2 minutes ago, transam said:

You are not in England.Oh, perhaps you are...?

No, I'm not... that's why I said it could be different here but I'm not seeing why it would be.

Just now, xylophone said:

A Thai company formed in the correct manner, which operates a business, that employs the requisite number of Thai employees and generates an income from its business and has Thai shareholders who have invested their own funds into the company, can own property.

 

Companies set up for the specific purpose of owning a property/land which don't conform with the above are a sham and are illegal.

Well, if so better not to do it...  but I find what you say surprising and nobody has actually pointed to any law that bears it out. It's always dangerous to assume Thai law is the same as the law of western countries, but those are some big differences.

I just don't understand why the fact that all the company does is own a house makes it dodgy. There's nothing dodgy about an English company that just owns a house in England, and no need to make out that it is actually doing something else. It could be different here, for sure, but I am not seeing why it would be. I think it's correct that foreigners can't own freehold land in Thailand and can't have a majority shareholding in a Thai company, but there is no need to break either of those rules in order to set up and control a company that owns land.

If anyone knows where these rules are actually laid down in law, it might be worth looking at them. Maybe there's more to it than not being able to own freehold land or a majority shareholding.

2 hours ago, Crash999 said:

There’s no debate about the legality of nominee shareholder structures. It is clearly illegal if the Thai shareholders are nominees and not actively participating in the management of the property investment business. 

I was not clear why people are saying it is not legal for a Thai company to own a Thai property.

Is the reason just that they are assuming the company will be a sham then?

I was wondering about buying a house at some point in the future for my gf's family to live in. It's very much a drawing board thing at the moment but I'd appreciate any input.

What I had in mind was to form a Thai company and set it up so that I am sole director and cannot be removed without a 65% vote (which I would be able to block). I would inject some funds into the company and have it buy a property using a combination of those funds and money it had borrowed from a Thai bank. The property would then be leased to the family and myself. The shares in the company could be set up in such a way that by paying the rent, the family were effectively buying their way into the property. Even so, the arrangement between the family and the company would be a straight lease.

Does anyone have any insight on whether the banks would lend to a company buying a property to let, and if so at what rates and what sort of loan-to-value?

Thanks

Back home I get a brutal massage every week or so at a Chinese therapist's. It does me the world of good.

The nearest thing I have had here is a Thai massage in a strictly legit type place, but that was still a full body massage, when I really want a couple of problem areas beasting for the whole session.

I googled but I am not finding anything. Any recommendations for something that's a bit more like physio / trigger point therapy for specific issues, and a bit less sabaai sabaai?

Thanks

BTW I read somewhere that The Yoga Tree were starting Feldenkrais sessions, and there is a guy there who is a rolfing teacher/ practitioner.

On 8/11/2018 at 4:15 PM, Angela22 said:

Hi, sorry I do not know one but I am looking for a teacher also.  I will follow this link but please let me know if you find one.  Thank you very much

I think you would be lucky to find a teacher here in CM but you could try contacting the Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique via https://alexandertechnique.co.uk/

Other national societies are mostly affiliated with STAT, I think.

Otherwise, Qi Gong and Tai Chi have quite a lot in common with AT, so may be worth looking into.

Thanks for the info guys

Can anyone tell me how STD/STI tests work in CM and especially:

- how long it takes to get results

- what they generally test for

- whether they use the "triple swab"

I am just getting into a relationship and we have had the talk about this. We put each other at risk maybe 10 days ago, but if I go along with her and get tested now, it's really just to show support, because HIV doesn't usually show up for a couple of months, and anything else can wait until then. Her situation is different because plenty of things can cause infertility in a woman if not treated right away. I'm not sure she realises this, but I don't want to put her off or make her go on her own when she wants me to come with.

In the UK you just give a blood and urine sample unless you have discharge (sorry), but I know other places routinely use a swab test (i.e. scrape the urethra) because I went once and it's not something I'm going to forget. What's the score in CM? I like this girl enough to have an extra blood and urine test (I will go in a couple of months anyway) but I'm not sure about the triple swab.

Also, from what she says they only test for HIV and syphilis, which is a bit of a concern. Do you have to ask specifically for anything more than that?

Thanks,

AD

Did not know about re-entry permits... I take it they don't change the exit by date, i.e. if you have an SETV that is good for 60/90 days, the clock is still ticking while you are away and you will still have to leave Thailand within 60/90 days of the original date of entry. I just had a quick google on that but I didn't find anything that made it clear.

Bizarrely, the NY site says:

To obtain multiple entry tourist visa, a certify letter from employer OR a letter from educational institution certifying a full-time student status is required.

What?

If it's any help, a UK tax return would show the profit and loss of each business, like a schedule C, as well as the income from employment that (I believe) would be on the employer's W2 in the US, and income or capital gains from other sources like property investments or bank interest. Self assessment and tax return are the same thing - so basically the document required in the UK covers all your income and capital gains tax, which may go on different forms in the US.

I still don't really understand why they want to see return / equivalent US documents, although the posts above were very clear in saying that it doesn't get much attention anyway.

One of the boxes on the UK form is along the lines of 'in the relevant tax year, were you... not resident in the UK'. Not sure whether that box gets more attention...

Well, the consensus is clearly that it always says /ng/. If it did sometimes says /mg/, it would still be written ง, just as English x sometimes says /ks/ and sometimes /gz/, but is written x in either case.

13 hours ago, digbeth said:

Where in Thailand did you notice this? maybe down south from Chumporn down they have accents and ways of pronouncing things like a lisp that could make you heard it like that?

Chiang Mai - although thinking back, in Skype lessons with a teacher from Phuket, when she gave me a new word and I had to work out the spelling, more than once I had ม at the end when it should actually have been ง.

The clearest example I have found online is the sample pronuncation of  ถุง on http://www.thai-language.com/let/182. If you click through though and go to the ถุง page, there is a different sound clip which has the /ng/ sound. I went to YT and looked through a few videos that go through the alphabet, and there were no very clear instances of /mg/, even if some of them were a bit ambiguous.

I think the explanation at the end of Briggsy's post is probably the right one, so there isn't much in my original suggestion, but this thread has at least cleared a couple of things up for me.

Sure, I understood the point you were making but I have an open mind on whether the sound does or does not exist in standard Thai - to me that's the next question to ask.

In your first post you also seemed to have an open mind - but you are now saying it is not correct, when as far as I can see nothing has changed.

In my own native language there are instances of lazy pronunciation that I would regard as incorrect (a cleaner we had at work would say 'bokkle' instead of 'bottle', for example) but there are also instances of correct pronunciation that is wrongly regarded as incorrect because of misconceptions about language, such as the belief that spelling determines pronunciation, or that a given phoneme must always be realised in the same way. Many children for example are trained to pronounce the word 'that' with the 'a' vowel in every case, when it should be a schwa if the word is unstressed. Whether the -mg realisation of ง belongs in the first of those categories or the second, I don't know, but I don't think the fact that learning resources describe it as -ng settles the question. For me, resources of that kind are only a starting point, and it is up to us to explore the details and thus come to understand the language. If there is some reason why it must always be -ng then I am all ears, but if this idea rests on the view that a given phoneme always corresponds to the same sound, I have to say I don't share that view.

1 hour ago, Briggsy said:

/m/ requires the lips to be shut. /ng/ requires them to be open to prevent it sounding like /m/. Could this be the issue that the lips are opened slightly after the beginning of the pronunciation of the phoneme? And could this be related to the preceding vowel sound?

Yes, that sounds very plausible to me. It could just be that if the lips are shut when the person begins to pronounce what would otherwise be /ng/, it comes out /mg/ or even /mng/, and it would make perfect sense that that would depend on what had come immediately before.

I'm not sure we can say there is no literature or commentary - I have A Reference Grammar of Thai but that's about it. It isn't really a pronunciation manual, and anyway I can't say I have scoured it for info on this topic. In any case, this type of issue is often not documented, and it's very easy to overlook differences in sound when, as far as the listener is concerned, the sounds represent the same phoneme. I had a mate at uni who was from Bolton and he was totally oblivious to the difference in the vowels in look/luck, book/buck, took/tuck etc. because in his accent there was no difference. He would have been hearing them pronounced differently on the TV and whatever all his life, but hadn't noticed because we process everything according to the sound>phoneme mappings of our own dialect. Obviously, it's also easy to convince yourself there is a difference when there isn't, and I'm just as susceptible to that as anyone else...

3 hours ago, Briggsy said:

@Artful Dodger

 

You appear to have created a distinction that I was unaware of, namely that ง at the end of a syllable has two distinct pronunciations.

 

Apart from the way you hear the words pronounced, are you aware of any linguistic material, such as a textbook, documenting this distinction. I am not.

No, I was hoping someone else might be. If you go to www.thai-language.com though, there are clips of native speakers saying various words and if you compare the two words I mentioned you may hear a difference. I have only heard the -mg version at the end of a syllable - when ง is in initial position it always sounds like ng- to me.

3 hours ago, Briggsy said:

 

Could it possibly be first language interference affecting the way you hear these sounds. May I ask what your first language is and if it is English, which regional variety you speak?

Yes, that's always a possibility to take into account - but I think it's rare for this to cause you to hear two sounds as different if they are the same. It does happen sometimes - for example Thais sometimes hear my English d sound as ด and sometimes as ต, but that's because it is between the two. I think your suggestion would be very plausible if English had both -mg and -ng, and ง was between the two, but that's not really the case. I can make the sound -mg without any difficulty, but it is hard to think of words that use it - it's not part of the basic inventory of English sounds. Mostly, I think interference works the other way around. For example, someone might be oblivious to the difference between พ and ป because both of them register as p. This stems from the fact that we register phonemes rather than sounds - the difference is quite well explained on Wikipedia:

A phoneme is a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the same function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example is the English phoneme /k/, which occurs in words such as cat, kit, scat, skit. Although most native speakers do not notice this, in most English dialects the "c/k" sounds in these words are not identical: in  kit (help·info) [kʰɪt] the sound is aspirated, while in  skill (help·info) [skɪl] it is unaspirated. The words therefore contain different speech sounds, or phones, transcribed [kʰ] for the aspirated form, [k] for the unaspirated one. These different sounds are nonetheless considered to belong to the same phoneme, because if a speaker used one instead of the other, the meaning of the word would not change: using the aspirated form [kʰ] in skill might sound odd, but the word would still be recognized.

In other words there's nothing unusual about a single phoneme mapping to more than one sound, but when it does, this does not mean you can use those sounds interchangeably. With this in mind it's quite possible that the phoneme ง does and is supposed to have different sounds in different words... but the fact that it is possible doesn't make it so, which is why I was wondering whether anyone else heard a difference.

For the record, my first language is English and I am originally from the Oxford area.

I thought I saw a thread on here a while back about unwritten vowels and especially the implied เ-าะ in words like บริษัท, can't find it now though. I am wondering whether the best way to see this is that on the level of the writing system there is only one unwritten vowel, i.e. โ-ะ, and the others are really to do with the pronunciation of consonant clusters. In other words, when Thai speakers need to insert a vowel sound in order to pronounce a cluster, it is typically -ะ (as in สบาย) but for certain (all?) clusters where the second consonant is ร, it is เ-าะ (as in บริษัท). This suggests that unwritten vowels other than โ-ะ are not full-fledged vowels at all and should be even shorter than the normal short vowel.

I am just musing really - is there any merit in this theory / are there any counterexamples?

Does anyone else feel that ง is often pronounced more like -mg than -ng when it is in final position? I hear it that way when out and about and I have just been on thai-language.com where the clip of a native speaker saying  ถุง also sounds this way.

I also hear it pronounced -ng, for example in สิ่ง - maybe it depends on the vowel and/or the tone. If so, it would be good to work out which vowels / tones take the -mg sound and which take the -ng sound.

Thanks guys.

I'm surprised immigration would not know that the old passport had been cancelled - I would have thought the systems would be networked together in such a way that it would be flagged up.

Do we know what the (London) consulate is looking for on the tax return that self-employed people have to submit with the application? Is it a certain level of income, or an ongoing business in the UK, or what? I am winding down and the point will come when the tax return does not show very much.

For me the benefit of the METV is that you can come and go more or less as you please. I think the only other way to achieve that (ignoring visa exempt entries) is to get an Elite card. I am not sure about the retirement visas but am not old enough yet anyway.

I'm thinking of an METV next year, for the flexibility. It looks as though you can only get one from your own country though (in my case the UK). I want the last entry to be in November or December but that means applying in May or June, and I don't want to be in the UK then.

I am half thinking about making a postal application from somewhere in the region (not Thailand itself) but obviously you have to send your passport, so the consulate would see an entry stamp without a corresponding exit stamp.

Do you folks out there think that would be a problem (I am betting yes...)

If so, is there anywhere in the region that does not stamp you out?

I suppose the other way to do it would be to apply for a new passport and have that sent to the consulate with the visa application, but I can see myself having trouble leaving the country I'd entered on the old passport if I do that.

TIA

Thanks Rick

On 22/05/2017 at 8:55 PM, JamJar said:

So Mastercard isn't the next best solution. It is the best solution in some cases...

On 24/05/2017 at 6:42 PM, rickudon said:

JamJar's responses pretty well sum up the case for UK expats. I use the Halifax clarity Mastercard (Mastercard in my experience, usually give better exchange rates than Visa). Even when taking into account Aeon ATM fees, it is usually cheaper to use it to get money that way than use an interbank transfer, unless you are transferring about £2000 or more (depends of course on how much your sending bank charges, i use Halifax). And of course, send in GBP, not baht ....

Old thread I know - but do the UK banks / CC companies eventually look at your transactions, see THB, THB, THB, conclude that you are no longer resident in the UK and close your account?