Percy Penguin

Thanks all, good info. Sounds like both Hanoi and Siem Reap are worth a look.

On 10/13/2019 at 3:12 AM, donnacha said:

I don't think you need to worry too much about visa problems if you are flying into Chiang Mai. The vast majority of problems reported here are occurring at Don Mueang and certain notorious land borders.

It sounds as if you have the necessary finances to move around Asia a bit, so, you're in a lucky category, it should be fairly clear to airport IOs and consulate staff that you are not trying to live full-time in Thailand on tourist visas.

Yeah, I hope that's right, but you don't really know and I prefer to play it safe and spread the love a bit.

Quote

I am also looking at Malaysia and Indonesia (i.e. the main islands, not Bali). Malaysia appears to be quite expensive, especially if you want to retire there. A friend was recently in Indonesia for a few months and found it to be very good value. Online dating is pretty wild, precisely because there are so few whites there. He sent me photos of some of the girls he bedded and I was impressed. It also appears, according to my friend, that Muslim girls have a lot of sexual anxiety they need to work out.

I don't like Jakarta much - dirty, congested and not especially cheap. Can't comment on what it's like once you get out of the capital. I had a friend who worked in KL for a good few years and I went out quite a bit in that time. The booze is on the expensive side and there's not that much choice, but otherwise I'd say it caters for all budgets. I didn't meet that many Muslims there - mainly expats and Chinese Malaysians - but I've definitely been told that they're a lot more conservative than in Indonesia.

On 10/13/2019 at 1:32 AM, BritManToo said:

Hanoi (was there last weekend) is a bit too 'uptight' for me.

Siem Reap is great, has cheap beer, naughty massage, freelancers, cannabis, but is a hot as hell in the summer.

My pals all ended up in Phnom Penh, plenty of cheap beer and bar girls, and the river walk is nice in the morning and evening.

Most of the girls I encountered in SR and PP spoke pretty good English, I met a really nice one in PP.

Food was generally far better than CM, as a bonus good Indian restaurants in both places.

All the same Thai dishes but they make them with less chillis, and more coconut milk and peanuts.

Cheers, that's exactly what I wanted to know. Yeah the food is shocking in CM. The only decent Indian I have found is on one of the Sois off Loi Kroh. If you're going towards the old town I think it's the one on the left before No. 1 Belgian beer bar. Run by two old Pakistani-Thai women. It was a bit of a shack and not the cleanest place I've ever been to, but the food was really good. I know of a couple of places I've never tried but I'm jaded at this point. I'll get all excited and then be served something that tastes like Gandhi's flip flops.

Never mind, I'll just visit them and see.

8 hours ago, Hal65 said:

I've been researching this extensively and have decided to move to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It will cost me $130 and then another $140 to rent a shuttle van to move all my stuff. From there costs will change in the following ways:

 

Visa related: $700 yearly savings

Rent: $600 yearly increase

Female company: $25 extra per night. The girls are more sweet and amateur though.

 

...

 

Overall I expect costs to go up about $2,500/year. But I'll also be saving about $16,000 per 5 years in Elite visa, which will return about $1,450 per year or $800 per year post inflation.

I'm amazed the cost of living would be higher in Cambodia than Thailand (whereabouts in Thailand?)

I'm changing my plans a bit in light of all the stories about visa problems. I need somewhere to bounce to to cut my time in CM. I'm torn between Siem Reap, Hanoi and Vientiane. I know Hanoi a bit but what about Vientiane and SR? Can anyone give me an idea of how they compare to CM, especially in terms of bars, food and massage? I like chilled out bars. If there are bar girls, all well and good, but the pushy ones are just annoying. When I go for a massage I like to chat. In Vientiane they will speak Thai - in SR will I get 'sorry me English little'?

1 hour ago, cmarshall said:

 

Thai does not mark syllable boundaries any more than it marks word boundaries.  "To mark" means to represent graphically, i.e. explicitly, with a "mark."  There are no marks indicating syllable boundaries.  It's true that the reader can figure out where the syllable boundaries are implicitly, but figuring something out by learning and applying the Thai spelling rules is not the same as having it indicated graphically, in the way that Japanese marks syllable boundaries by spaces, i.e. with a "mark."

 

Sorry but I think that’s much too narrow. The script indicates where the boundaries are, which English doesn’t. ‘Figuring out’ may be what we do as learners, but if the comparison is going to be fair, it has to be between adept uses of both systems.

If you consider a random string like

ดาตแอง

and transliterate it as you might for an English speaker, you get something like

daataeng

We can see from that that there are two syllables, but have no idea where the boundary is – in other words we can’t tell whether it is daa / taeng or daat / aeng. That makes a big difference to the way we read the string.

As far as I know that string is meaningless, so a Thai speaker can’t tell where the boundaries are by recognising the words (whichishowwewouldextracttheboundariesinEnglish). Nevertheless, if you look back at the Thai you can see it has to be daat / aeng, because daa / taeng would be

ดาแตง

I think that is just as obvious to a native Thai speaker / reader as the tone of a word like พูด. In your terms the tone of that word is not marked but has to be ‘figured out’, whereas the tone of a word like ช่าง is marked, because the spelling rules require a diacritic. I don’t think there is a relevant distinction here. In both cases the script indicates the tone to an adept reader right away – it’s not something they have to puzzle over. The same goes for the syllable boundaries. I am happy with the term ‘marked’ – if you want to use a different word that’s fine with me, but it doesn’t affect the point.

1 hour ago, cmarshall said:

 

The introduction of spacing would imply an improvement under the assumption that change equals improvement.  But why would one think that?  Are either shorter or longer skirts on women an improvement?  How about the introduction or disappearance of horsehair wigs on men?  One needs to be wary of succumbing to the Whig interpretation of history as inherently progressive.

I don't think you have to assume that all change equals improvement to conclude that a change in a writing system that is voluntarily adopted and sticks for centuries is helpful to users of that system. I certainly don't think that history is inherently progressive.

1 hour ago, cmarshall said:

 

I don't know enough of the history of writing to know what the medievals thought they were doing when they adopted changes in writing.  Did they believe they were increasing legibility or efficiency in reading?  Or was it just a series of fads?  

 

We know that the largest economy in the world, China, and the third largest, Japan, have writing systems that impose significant additional educational burdens by comparison with alphabetic writing systems.  Nevertheless, both countries have higher literacy rates than the US.  

That may well be so, but there are a lot of factors that fed into literacy rates besides the efficiency of the writing system, so I'm not sure where it takes us. I know zip about Chinese and Japanese, so can't comment on how they relate to Thai.

1 hour ago, cmarshall said:

I don't know what you mean by claiming that Thai already has word boundaries.  That's not the case.  Words have a beginning and an end, of course, but these are not indicated graphically. 

I didn't claim that. I said that the Thai script generally marks syllable boundaries but that westerners tend to be oblivious to this. I was suggesting that this system might be just as good as our system of marking word boundaries, but only if you actually use it... As I said in a previous post, we tend to complain that the tool we are used to is not available, but don't look at what else is in the box.

54 minutes ago, Sheryl said:

The only advantage to Elite other than not having to deal with the paperwork etc of annual extensions of stay that I have been able to identify is fast track through airport immigration.  It is very poorly designed with no meaningful benefits other than ability to stay in Thailand. Even for people living in Bangkok there is no real 90 day reporting service as I would define it...as people have to travel in person to  Elite office to drop off passport and again to pick it up.

 

However, bear in mind in  your case that when you are eligible for retirement extension you may be required to purchase an expensive, low value local health insurance policy regardless of whether you have other insurance. (WILL be for sure if you enter on an O-A. Might be able to avoid that by entering on another visa and changing it to an O, or managing to get an O to begin with from a place that still issues them,  but I would not count on that loophole persisting). And this will cost you almost as much as Elite does per year. As much or more if you opt for a meaningful level of cover or grow older.

Hmm, another way of saying that is that the Elite may double in cost after you're committed. I'll pass and try and stay under the (nebulous) tourist visa threshold.

25 minutes ago, cmarshall said:

So, all the provincials here believe that Thai word spacing is inherently inferior to the word spacing they have grown up with?  As far as I know, no East Asian languages have word spacing.  Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Burmese either have no word spacing in the Thai manner or have spaces around every character (not word) which is the same thing.  Doesn't seem to bother them.  I can tell you from experience the more you read Thai, the easier it gets, however slowly.

 

Classical Greek and Latin did not have word spacing, which only appeared, along with punctuation and capitalization, during the Middle Ages.  People managed.  I think it would be impossible to construct a test that would control for other variables and isolate the effect on reading efficiency of just word spacing.  

Well, that second bit seems to imply that spacing was an improvement, and if that's the case for Latin and Greek, you have to ask why it wouldn't be the case for Thai as well. My answer is that Thai already shows syllable boundaries, and the real problem is that westerners don't really cotton on to this because they are so used to the system of showing word boundaries using spaces.

I had the same thought as you about tests. The nearest thing would be syllables per minute, I think, but that still doesn't control for everything. I did have a look for something along those lines and there were studies comparing European languages but nothing on English vs Thai. I don't believe that an adept reader of Thai is any slower than an adept reader of English.

5 hours ago, MattDM said:

Didn't count really the days in 2018. Two SETV's with extension plus about 5 weeks of the start of the METV

6 hours ago, MattDM said:

I was in Thailand during 2019 for 6 months, less about 3 weeks for the trips to Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar and Vietnam

With that history there was always a high risk they wouldn't let you in this time, especially coming in at BKK. There's obviously something pretty wrong with a system that takes money off you for a visa and then doesn't let you in. Did Hull give you any kind of warning that this might happen?

Way beyond a joke at this point...

5 hours ago, nailbrains8 said:

I've known him since he first came to Thailand and his only other history was a single entry tourist visa.

 

- Single Entry (back to England)

- METV (back to England)

- METV (DENIED)

 

That's his entire history.

Do you know how long he's spent in Thailand within the last 12 months?

I'm starting to wonder if an SETV is actually safer because it doesn't signal 'if you let me in now I'll be back again pretty soon'.

14 minutes ago, ColeBOzbourne said:

There's nothing easy about it, the teacher can't force it to happen, the brunt of the work lies on the student's back.

+1

I've sat in a few classes now but the way I see it they just enable you to go out and learn. The actual learning mostly happens out of class.

I do 5 - 6 mths a year in Thailand, and until recently I felt there was a good chance of being able go to on that way until I get to 50 and become eligible for a retirement visa. Plan B has been to stump up for an elite visa.

The 5-year elite visa effectively lasts for 6 years and at 43 I am only 7 years away from 50.

Recently there have been a few posters in a situation pretty similar to mine saying they have been refused entry, or had a very near miss. The situation is only getting more difficult, so I'm thinking there's a high chance of having to pay the 500k for the elite at some point in the next 7 years.

Imagine it happened when I was 48. That would be fairly irritating because I'd be paying for 6 years, but maybe only getting the benefit for 2. I would have been able to get a retirement visa for the other 4 anyway.

That is making me wonder if there are any advantages in having an elite visa once you're over 50. If not it might be better to go for it now.

BTS I am not mad about Bangkok so probably wouldn't get the 90 day reporting service, and I think the airport transfer service only applies to Bangkok as well. Other than those things, does the elite have any benefits over and above an ordinary SETV / METV?

5 hours ago, tgeezer said:

ต,ด and บ,ป similarly differ in both cases in one aspect only which is that both are ระเบิด ไม่มีลม but ด บ are ก้อง and ด ป are ไม่ก้อง .  

ก้อง is to sound like a drum, is that “voiced”?

Must be...

Yes - it doesn't seem to be in the RID but Thaitux has โฆษะ : (N) ; voice ; Related:vocalization, sound ; Syn:ก้อง

I managed to get someone who asked for help with English pronunciation to make the v sound by starting with ฟ and adding voice. I didn't know the correct term but เสียง worked fine. This approach worked really well in fact.

I remember a teacher using ลม to refer to aspiration, so I'm sure your first para is right.

On 10/3/2019 at 1:23 PM, Oxx said:

 

No.  It's never a "g".  It has its own sound which does not occur in English.  Conversely, the English "g" sound does not occur in Thai - or putting it in your terms, there's no "G" whatsoever in the Thai alphabet.

 

As for "most of the time", again no.  The sound is not variable.

5 hours ago, Enki said:

Sorry,

you are simply wrong. Chicken is Gai ... a clear G. Perhaps your mother language has some side "tones" / "notes" to a G ... for me as a German, no pun intended, Gai sounds like German, the exact same G.

 

English g is always voiced, but ก is never voiced. The reason it seems more like g is that g is never aspirated, whereas k often is. German may well be different. If I say güt I use an unaspirated consonant much like ก, but then I did a whole 2 years of German at school and have been there twice, so that doesn't really prove anything. Anyway, Oxx was talking about English.

I don't see much difference between ก and the unaspirated k that occurs after other consonants, as in skin, so I'd say that English does have the Thai sound, but Thai doesn't have the English sound. IOW, ก is like ต or ป in that it does occur in English, just not at the beginning of a word. If you go with k English speakers will tend to aspirate it, whereas if you go with g they will tend to voice it - so neither option is perfect, but then neither is wrong IMO. In favour of g is the fact that Thai doesn't have a voiced version, so Thai speakers will probably realise you were going for ก, whereas if you use k as in kin - which Thai does have - they will hear ค. In favour of k is the fact that it helps you realise that the ก / ค pairing is the same as  ต / ท, ป / พ etc. OTOH.

The SEALang Thai corpus is useful for seeing how words are used in context and testing out ideas like that.

On 9/26/2019 at 3:02 PM, phichay said:

... Once you learn the rules of the consonants (starting and finishing consonants) and the vowel structures, whether straight or clustered, you will understand that there is no need for gaps between words. The rules dictate the start and finish of the word...

I don't think they dictate the start and finish of the word, otherwise the problem mentioned by digbeth wouldn't exist. I think the point is more that although Thai script doesn't usually show word boundaries like English, it does usually show syllable boundaries, which English doesn't. We don't tend to take this on board, I guess because there's no equivalent in the languages most of us grew up with. We complain that the tool we are used to is missing instead of learning to use the one we've been given.

We can read English script without spaces without too much trouble even with no practice at all, after years of being used to spaces, and with no way of identifying syllable boundaries except by recognising the words. That being the case, there's no reason to think that the lack of spaces in Thai causes any problem to native speakers who have grown up with it and can recognise the syllable boundaries instantly, as well as knowing the words.

Well, there was at one point, although apparently it varied a lot from place to place. It had many words in common with Siamese but also had its own script and its own system of six tones. These were essentially the five Thai tones, plus an extra tone that is described as falling but was not the same as the ordinary falling tone.

I am in Chiang Mai at the moment and have heard a few words with what sounds to me like a variant of the normal falling tone, so I'm wondering if this is what is left of the sixth tone. I realise that the tones do vary for all sorts of other reasons, but was interested in the idea that there might be a link with Lanna.

I was wondering whether the words หญ้า and ใบ้ exist in Lanna and, if so, whether they have the sixth tone. It'd be good to get a list of Lanna words that use the sixth tone, and maybe some minimal pairs to compare it with the (Lanna) falling tone.

I did find this in an old thread:

On 11/14/2011 at 10:05 PM, Richard W said:

...

1. I believe the following actually have the sixth tone, i.e. the same tone as หน้า 'face', เสื้อ 'clothing', ข้าว 'rice', ห้า 'five' and ผ้า 'cloth':
   1.  
   2. ญุ้ง = 'ยุ่ง', 'to be busy, involved'
   3. นิ๊ง = 'เกี่ยง', 'to argue over'
   4. เฒ่า in 'ป้อเฒ่า' 'grandfather'. (Etymologically, เฒ่า ought to be spelt เถ้า - it isn't just English that has etymologically incorrect spellings.)

 

[*]I believe the following actually have the 'falling' tone, i.e. the same tone as พ่อ 'father' (generally transcribed as ป้อ for Northern Thai) and แม่ 'mother'

 

1. ผ้าน = 'เข็ด, ขยาด' 'to be afraid of'
2. น้วม = 'ข้ำ, เละ', 'to be mushy'

 

...

This is a help, but can anyone add to it or point me to something online?

Thanks

4 hours ago, jackdd said:

The reason stamped in his passport actually translates to: Doesn't have basic needs. Or to simplify it: He is impoverished.

This reason is just abused by immigration to deny people who they suspect of working even though they have zero evidence.

3 hours ago, Mattd said:

Exactly, it is their way of saying we think you work here but cannot prove it.

As I said, you can see the reasoning, a young bloke who is spending large amounts of time in Thailand, how is he supporting himself etc. 

As far as immigration are concerned, the means to stay in Thailand in cases such as this is provided for by the Elite program, I am not saying this is right or wrong, but you can see the logic.

 

To add to this, the pattern of denials are mostly visitors who make serial visits to Thailand and are under the age of 50.

That's exactly it. I disagree when Jackdd says it's abuse though.

The OP says he was questioned for half an hour but doesn't say what they asked him or what chance he was given to say where his money was coming from, if not from some kind of work in Thailand. If he can't demonstrate a source of income outside Thailand, you can't blame them for drawing the obvious inference.

Having cash on you doesn't help show where it comes from- those are two different things.

OP also doesn't say how many months of the year he spends in Thailand, only how many entries over the life of the last passport. More than 6 months per year is asking for trouble IMO, and I don't think that's a new thing.

Looks to me as though you don't find out how much you are going to end up with until it's too late to change your mind. You also have to decide which crypto currency you are going to use. If you go for the Everex token the transaction costs seem to be less, but it's very volatile (chart at https://www.worldcoinindex.com/coin/everex). It can easily shift by more than the ATM fee in the time it takes to transfer the EUR, do the two conversions and withdraw the THB. Of course it might shift in your favour and you might come out ahead, but it's a gamble. If it stayed flat, it looks to me as though there'd be a small saving over most but not all cards. The other tokens are set up to stay close to USD so are pretty stable, but then the transaction costs are higher - I think about 3% overall if you are paying in EUR. A fee-free Mastercard is going to be less than that unless the max withdrawal is really low, say EUR 300. For me there'd have to be a significant saving to justify the extra hassle and the fact that you're going through a channel that's not nearly as tightly regulated as an ordinary CC. I'll keep an eye on it but I don't think the benefit is there at the moment.

On 9/14/2019 at 2:25 PM, Cheops said:

I'm also interested in this Everex app, but as another poster stated there will be several fees if you want to use crypto to do this (unless you already have the crypto in the Everex app). If you fund the wallet with Paypal the fee is 5%????? They call that less fees? I think it might be more cheaper just to use a regular ATM withdrawal. Can someone show ALL possible fees involved from an Euro account until the ATM withdrawal in Thai baht using this wallet? What are these SEPA fees? How much are they?

I have the same question. I can't see this info on the website so it looks like the only way to find out is to give it a try...

With the SETV, if you extend to 90 days I think you can get a re-entry permit at the same time, then re-enter after the original last entry date. Can you do the same with the METV e.g. if the Valid Until date on the visa itself is 10 November, can you enter 1 November, extend stay to 90 days and get permission to re-enter, leave 1 December, and re-enter 20 December?

Don't know of an online resource, but there's a book that does exactly that. Have a look on amazon to get the the title then buy locally maybe. I have to say, the last Lao I met seemed to speak perfect Thai, so I'm not sure it's really necessary to learn Lao, but good on you if you do.

On 7/7/2019 at 3:33 PM, Mark1066 said:

You can probably pick up a reasonably priced secondhand Squier bass in Thailand. While not as cheap as the USA, the prices for Squier guitars here are no worse than in the UK, probably a bit cheaper now. Keep an eye on kaidee.com and guitarthai.com classified section and you should find one fairly soon. I'm not sure what would happen in Bangkok but in Chiang Mai, if you order something that has to be assessed for import duty and sales tax, they ask you to come to the customs office at the airport. The shipping charges, and the import duty and sales tax on them, would make ordering a squire from overseas an uneconomical proposition.

Are you in CM then? I would like to pick up a 6-string in the next couple of months, maybe a Tele, maybe a PRS. I was thinking of getting one on ebay or thomann, so it's good to know about the tax, but I'm not crazy about mail order because you don't get to check the guitar out first, and sending it back would be a headache... Would I find that kind of instrument anywhere in CM? I will be in Ho Chi Minh in a couple of months so could potentially pick one up there and bring it back with my baggage. I guess I would have more choice down there, and potentially get more for my money(?)