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rcummings

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Posts posted by rcummings

  1. On 7/24/2020 at 10:54 AM, Jack Hna said:

    I've had some of these and they are very nice, slightly dry a hint of juice and crunchy. 

     

    The ones I ate came from a farm in kranuan.

     

     

    If you give them a few days they will soften and turn brown and become very sweet, just like dried dates but more succulent. Anyway, it used to be that fresh dates came from Israel and some Arab countries and were very costly. Now all I see in the supermarkets are fresh Thai dates. Still not cheap but at Makro, last time I checked, 199 baht for 1/2 kilo.

  2. On 8/4/2020 at 10:39 AM, Logosone said:

    China suspends air routes from Thailand after positive covid tests

     

    https://www.thaienquirer.com/15661/china-suspends-air-routes-from-thailand-after-positive-covid-tests-airlines-say-no-passengers-disembarked-in-thailand/

     

    Testing in Thailand has of course been on a mickey mouse scale, 99% of Thais remain untested.

     

    If every test is negative that would raise the question why China has closed air routes from Thailand after passengers tested positive. Just curious. 

     

     

    None of those passengers boarded the planes in Thailand.

  3. On 7/18/2020 at 8:55 AM, Chassa said:

    I ordered a new passport from the Australian embassy in Bangkok they immediately cancelled my old one. Had to wait 3 weeks for the new one. My cancelled passport was not accepted by the airline but my drivers licence was OK.

    Because if your passport gets canceled, they think you're no longer the same person? Kinda weird but I guess that's how bureaucracy thinks. Or doesn't.

  4. On 8/8/2020 at 8:08 AM, cmarshall said:

    There are really only two options for quality instruction in Thai, by which I mean equivalent to the level of teaching at an American university.  I have studied at both schools.

     

    Intensive Thai Program Chulalongkorn University. http://www.arts.chula.ac.th/CTFL/intensivethai

     

    This program is indeed intensive since the curriculum calls for learning at least thirty new words per day.  The teachers are excellent.  Many of them either have PhDs or are working on them.  It is a team teaching approach in which they rotate the teach every few days, so that the student adjusts to the individual teachers' slightly different way of speaking.  The teachers follow such a well-laid out schedule that no disruption results from switching teachers so frequently.  They do something else which is quite remarkable.  The pace that the teacher speaks Thai to the students starts slow in level one and then notches up a little in level two and so on for each level.  The extraordinary thing is that the teachers all adjust their speaking pace in unison.  

     

    Classes were a little smaller in my day.  I understand that average size now is about fifteen.  Students are highly motivated and very diverse.  The full course runs nine levels and takes about a year.  

     

    Sumaa Institute for Language and Culture.  http://www.sumaa.net/

     

    Sumaa was founded by three teachers who had started the Intensive Thai Program at Chulalongkorn.  However, unlike the Chula program, most instruction is one-on-one rather than classroom, the advantage of which is that you get a lot more correction which is essential.  The teachers are highly qualified, several having master's degrees as described on their website.  Sumaa has a distinguished roster of former students who have gone on to work with the Thai language including business people, academics, military, and diplomats such as the past or present ambassadors of the US, the UK, Germany, Australia, Ireland, and probably others I don't know about.  Teaching at Sumaa may be either in person or online.

     

    I am currently continuing to study at Sumaa.

     

    Compared to other schools in Thailand, Sumaa and Chula are expensive, but compared to the cost of equivalent education in Europe or the US, they are cheap.  

     

     

     

    I see that Sumaa also offers online teaching. At least I got that message when I first loaded their homepage.

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