montrii

work socks

yas it doz, u got that rite

I live in this area, and never lack for good food . . . actually some of the best places are the little streetside stalls, some great little ก๋วยเตี๋ยว, ช้าวต้ม, and ข้าวแกง places on Sukhumvit near the corner of Soi 50, across from Lotus. Also, every evening the tables go out along the sidewalk on Soi 50 just above Sukhumvit, the food there is top-notch, they must have some good cooks, and although the atmosphere of eating streetside isn't exactly like the riverside, it's an "only in Asia" experience. I've been to the British Pub a bit up Soi 50, maybe about 300 yards past Lotus and in a little soi to the left. That's OK, but tiny, and not run by Brits, but by a retired Thai couple. I had fish and chips and it was fine. A little lonely, though, I was the only one in the place. Might be fun to go there with some other folks though.

I've always considered the trains, especially overnight express trains, the best way to travel in Thailand, and I first came here over 40 years ago.

The "seat 61" link is good, and it points out that you can reserve online, at least for the major routes (North, South, Northeast). Here's the link to reservations, English version: http://www.thairailwayticket.com/Default.aspx?language=1 My preference is 2nd class sleeper, they have them now both with air con and with fans. I can go with either, but the air con is a little more comfortable. What I like about 2nd class is that you're in with a bunch of folks you don't know, and it can be a good hang. You can order food, beer, etc, sit and talk, then they make up the beds, you can read yourself to sleep, wake with the dawn, and watch the scenery till you get where you're going. If you want privacy, you can get all you want in the first class compartment. I don't agree with a previous commenter that there's not much to see on the way to Ubon, or anywhere else, Thailand is full of great views. I've traveled on the VIP buses, they're really not comfortable compared to the train. Planes, well, we all know what they're like, fast, but cramped. Of course, going to Krabi you'd have to switch to a bus at Surat Thani, but it's only about a 3-hour ride, I think, and not bad. You can catch the bus right there by the train station in Surat. I guess they're not for everybody, I don't really understand why, unless they're in a hurry, but personally I love 'em.

Hey everyone,

Looking for like minded people who love speaking thai and love singing thai songs!แบบว่าเพลงไทยที่จับใจนะคับ . i'm from Australia. I've been here for almost 4 years. I'm a musician and i'm really interested in setting up gigs that consist of 2 farangs or more who can do a decent job performing good thai tunes(there's good money to be made here if it's done well). I love to sing karaoke here so as an introduction we could hook up at some place for fun and take it from there. ถ้าสนใจติดต่อได้นะคับผม เอาแบบพูดคุยเป็นภาษาไทยก้อได้ด้วยนะ แล้วแต่แล้วกันนะครับ

Mark

Hey, Mark, I sent you an e-mail, did you get it? Maybe interested, I'm a musician/singer, too, also interested, so if you're serious, get in touch. As far as ก็ vs ก้อ goes (there's a pun in there!), anyone who's read many Thai posts or e-mails, or been in Thai chat rooms will recognize them as interchangeable, in fact you don't see the "correct" word ก็ often at all, there are a lot of words that are mostly used in deviant (555) spellings, purists all over the world are grinding their teeth, I'm sure. cu later!

I'm pleased to be able to add my 2 cents here. 4 years ago I was working in tsunami relief in Phangaa. I'd had to go up to Bangkok, and naturally came back into Phuket airport, where I took a van into town to get a bus back up to my work, about 3 hours north. The van stopped at a main office and the passengers were put into cars depending on where they were going. I was the only one going to the bus station. I had my laptop (a good one) with me, but forgot it when I got out of the car. I bought the bus ticket north and then went to grab something to eat, had a couple of free hours. While eating I realized my laptop wasn't there. Naturally, I freaked--it had everything in it, including the stuff I was working on for the Thais. Thought I might have left it at the ticket office, but all of them there said I'd come in with just one bag. They were all really concerned, though. I realized I must have left it in the car that brought me there, but had no idea of what the firm's name was, or much idea of where the main office was. One of the motorcycle drivers got really interested--I'll never forget him, a white-haired guy named Chaa--and said he'd try to help me get it back. So I hopped on the back of his bike and he took me first to one travel agency which wasn't open--it was Sunday--and then another, which was. We explained the situation to the lady there at the desk, and she took a half hour or 45 minutges of her time to track the laptop down, first calling the airport to find out what company vans picked up passengers at the time I came in, then calling the different companies until she got one which remembered me. They, in turn, called the guy who was driving the car that had taken me to the bus station, and, amazingly, in about 20 minutes he showed up with the laptop, for which I gave him a nice tip, of course tipping my other two helpers generously. But by then I was late for the bus. Chaa said not to worry, he knew the guy driving the bus. He called him, and then I hopped on the back of his bike again and we rode halfway up the island of Phuket to where the bus had stopped and was waiting for us. All's well that ends well, but this incident, which could have easily been a disaster, really brought a smile to my heart in the land of smiles.

Here is another opinion from

http://www.geocities.com/Nashville/Opry/3009/history/019.htm: Here the notion is that เชียง is a derivative of a Burmese pronunciation. What do you think?

Wow, how did you ever know where to go to dig that up? A whole different take. I wonder about it, though, I bet Richard or Rikker would have something to say about changing a ฉ to a ช, or vice versa, just to reflect the local pronunciation . . .

Anyhow I think enough is enough, see my comments after Nan's very helpful post at http://www.thai-language.com/ubb_cgi/ultim...t=000060#000010. unless someone has some really promising leads here, I think we're as close as we're gonna get. Nan's material is worth looking at. Thanks one and all.

It would be a mistake to assume that multiple meanings are etymologically connected, without evidence that such is the case. I'll look around and see if I can find anywhere else that discusses it.

I certainly have made no such assumption! Most of the meanings David found were complete surprises, in any case. It would be great if you do find anything regarding a เชียง and a เวียง with meanings like "city" that connects them to each other and/or to a Chinese antecedent--that's all I'm looking for. You probably would know where to look for such things much better than most of us, so I'm glad you're involved, thanks.

จาก "ภาษาไทย ๕ นาที ชุดที่ ๕" หน้า ๒๗๒

'คำ ว่า "เชียง" พจนานุกรมล้านนา-ไทย ฉบับแม่ฟ้าหลวง ได้ให้ความหมายไว้ว่า "น. นักบวช, ภิกษุ, ทิด; ที่อยู่อาศัย, เมือง (ถ้าเวียง มักจะหมายถึง เมืองขนาดเล็ก, เมืองชั่วคราวหรือที่มั่นทางทหาร) ว. อย่างดี, พิเศษ"'

๕ นาทีหรือ ไม่เร็วไปหรือ?? 5555 That's better than Europe on 5$ a day. Anyhow this tells us that เชียง is a holy man of one sort or another, a place to live, a city (if it's เวียง then it's probably either a little town or a town guarded by soldiers), or it means "special," or good.

So at least one of the meanings is of a town. Thanks, David.

But this still doesn't answer about a Chinese origin. Is our worthy Richard able to help with this?

A friend sent me this question, which I was unable to answer.

>>Language question---easy, I think: "Chiang" (Thai) and "Wieng" (Lao)---are these both derived from a Chinese word for town or city which is similarly transliterated as "Chiang" or "Chieng"?<<

I'm not sure about the origins of these words. "เวียง" is a Thai/Lao word for "walled city," as in "เวียงจันทน์," but I don't know its origin. The เชียง in Chiengmai and Chiengrai, I really don't know!

Can anyone shed light on this?

Their focus is on reading and writing academic Thai, so if you are interested in listening and speaking skills, this is probably not the program for you.

The vocabulary is rather difficult. I am in Intermediate 1 (the 4h class of 9) and we are expected to learn a lot of complicated words which I rarely use in everyday life. We do presentations in Thai, which I find interesting. But sometimes I wonder about the utility of such work when our pronunciation is generally bad because they just keep moving on and the students focus so much on the reading/writing that their speaking/listening is not clear.

FYI, some of the students go to private tutors just to keep up with this program. Most of my classmates study for several hours at home every day.

Hi, Khunjet, good post. I probably met you, I was just in Intermediate 3 (I recently made a separate post on this under a different heading). Passed the test, but will be waiting till October to take Advanced 1, which is, I think, when your group will also arrive at that point, so we might be in the same class.

I agree with you that they could work more on pronunciation. This was not a problem for me, because I've spoken pretty good Thai for many years and am quite particular about speaking correctly, and had tested into the program at a high level already. But I saw that nearly all of the other students, who had started at the beginner level with this class, were difficult to understand when they spoke. I think that this is something the course planners should deal with early on: maybe they should add another five weeks at the basic level and give a higher priority to speaking correctly.

That said, I think that in my class we had plenty of opportunity to work on our speaking, and the teachers were very helpful in correcting us. The fact that they do, indeed, just keep on moving no matter what makes things more difficult, but it's also a great challenge. They were talking normal Thai to us at a normal (sometimes quite rapid) pace, and listening, understanding, and responding was exactly the right kind of practice for me. I don't agree about the course being oriented toward academic Thai, with a lot of words which aren't used in everyday life. It's true that to ask directions or buy things in a store you won't need that level of vocabulary, but if you want to understand TV (an everyday event, for sure) or read newspaper headlines (which is child's play for most Thais) you will need that vocabulary. Learning a language well involves exactly the kind of interaction and comprehension that we were doing in Inter 3.

I think you really do have to spend at least 3 or 4 hours a day outside of class in order to get a lot out of it. I sure did. That's why I'm waiting 2 and a half months to go on to the next level (that and the huge expense of the 5 weeks). It takes up your entire life, you have hardly any time to do anything else. But it was a big help for me, I could really feel the difference in my comprehension of both written and spoken Thai after only 5 weeks, and that's saying something, no? So I'd recommend it to anyone who is really serious about getting their Thai up to a higher level.

If a rich language is a complex language I think English is not a very rich language. In my whole life I studied not more that 200 hours English. I manage to read English literature and understand the biggest part of it.

Hi, Kris, I think maybe you have to be at a deeper level than you are with English to understand its complexity. It's my native language, I've studied the literature in some depth, and the complexity amazes me. I don't mean to disparage your linguistic ability at all, though, and kudos to you for getting good at it with not a whole lot of study. And I do agree with you that Thai is extremely rich, also. In fact it's so rich it drives me crazy! I have read Kafka in German, Virgil in Latin, and Sartre in French, and getting to that level took not too many years. Thai, on the other hand, still keeps handing me word after word that seems common enough but that I've never seen in all my many years of speaking and studying Thai.

I think the difference comes from the fact that I speak a European language, and the European languages are much more closely related than we tend to think. Thai has virtually no cognates to European languages (except for ทับศัพท์ words, which also give me fits), so when we come to it we come to it from the outside it's hard to see the forest for the trees. It is beautifully complex, too, though that complexity is still hard to measure for me, because I need to get much deeper in in order to really do that. Rikker makes the point that Thai poetry requires much more ability than the ability to read a Thai novel, and even that is still hard for me. So I would say, all languages are complex, and all are beautiful. Our ability to learn them quickly and thoroughly generally depends mostly on how closely the other languages we know are to the language we're trying to learn.

What proves that for me is that though I actually learned to speak rather good conversational Thai really quickly, getting to the deeper levels is making me jump through hoops that are much more difficult for me than anything I did with those other languages in college or grad school.

Thanks again for the great course description (I thanked you the first time a few months ago). My goal is to get to native-level fluency, which is still a long ways off, and your comments influenced me to test into the course . . . I tested in at Intermediate 3, the last level before advanced, started the course in mid-May, and have 2 weeks to go before the test. I'm enjoying it immensely: the teachers are, as you said, great, and so is the material. I can't get used to how many words there are to learn, I speak German and French, have read and written at a high level in those and in Latin, and none of those presented anything like such a long learning curve, but that's mostly due to the fact that this isn't an Indo-European language, I'm sure.

The course is, as you say, very time-consuming. I haven't been able to do a whole lot else besides go to school and do the homework, but the knowledge is pouring in.

I find there's a lot more speaking at this level than you suggest; perhaps that's changed. We are discussing things in class all the time, the teachers asking us for our opinions and analysis quite a bit. Plus the listening is a very big deal. I have spoken good Thai for quite a long time, but have had trouble listening to it spoken, mostly when unfamiliar vocabulary is used, at high speeds. This is helping a lot with that.

I am planning on taking a long break when the intermediate module is done on June 19, continuing my study on my own, then taking the first advanced module when it comes around again in October. I'm hoping the teacher you mention as the only bad one will have already gotten the PhD and will be doing something else. Will report back on that later on.

Thanks again, and to all who read this and are thinking about doing it, courage! You can do it if you really want to!

I studied Chula's intensive Thai program from May 2007 -April 2008. I've seen it get mentioned a lot here although it seems like not too many people have firsthand experience with it, so I thought I'd make myself available to answer any questions people might have about it. (I've got a week in Bangkok to kill before I go back home, and lots of free time to type this up) I was originally typing this as a reply in the pinned thread, but it seems a little long for that now. . . .

"We need to urgently know who is the victim," he said, requesting that the media published clear pictures of the victim's face to help police identify the victim.

Article (in Thai) and photo from Thai Rath:

http://www.thairath.co.th/onlineheadnews.html?id=124717

I went to this link twice, and saw two different stories, but nothing about the beheading. The first one was about a Thai girl selling sex on the internet, and the second was about Thailand's falling rate of economic growth. The id number must be changing all the time. Is there a more reliable link to the story?

Thanks, that was a wonderful read, very informative. I've been wondering how to ramp up my Thai to a really high level, so that I can easily read newspapers and get the jokes in sitcoms (the non-slapstick ones--not worried about the ones where they slap each other on the head and funny noises are played). I've been speaking Thai for an embarrassingly high number of years, and taught myself to read and write, even to spell pretty well, but I seem to be stuck at a high intermediate level, progress comes slowly. One advantage this course has is that it is really intensive, once you start you're in it for 5 weeks at least. I think I'll do the entrance exam, anyhow . . . the name "Basic" puts me off, I don't think of my knowledge as basic, but maybe it's just a word, and the Basic 3 course will be just what I need, esp. if it's intensive. I suppose one way to find out is to take tests for basic and intermediate courses. My problems with Thai right now are primarily related to 1) needing more vocabulary, there are just so many words for every single thing! 2) catching the idioms that no one knows how to explain to you, and 3) comprehending rapid-fire sentences. Depending on what's being said, I often find myself thinking "now what was that word?" and not even hearing the rest of the words.

I was playing in the band at another club, also crowded and with only a front exit, as far as I know. Scary, but I wasn't scared, because the thought of a tragedy never entered my mind Had no idea of this happening at Zantika, but when driving home heard lots of sirens. This, I believe, is not the first time this has happened here. Safety regulations are a drag for builders, but they've got to be put in place! This is one aspect of Western civilization the LOS should get hip to, and quick.

A novice at interpreting written Thai, I looked into this thread.

I would remark that academics writing in newspapers are not models of eloquence. There is usually strife between the editor's desire for simplicity of message and the academic's desire for expressing some deep thought. Furthermore, things written in newspapers are not written for posterity; the background for the message is supposed to be known to the readers, whereas the background would be explained to readers not au fait with current affairs. These things are generally true whether the paper is Thai or English, or Esquimaux.

I would suggest taking examples from literature rather than newspapers - and didn't I notice a thread on newspaper syntax?

- Roger -

Hi, Roger, I think the fact that this example came from a newspaper is irrelevant: what these guys are trying to get at is what the meaning of the text actually is, and, if it is bad writing, how to recognize that. Yoot suggests that the proper meaning can be gotten from it, but that it would better be expressed another way.

This example could have come from a novel, but that wouldn't mean that it should have been discussed in a thread particularly about writing in novels. David had a question about syntax and clauses, so I can't see why it shouldn't fit here, in the syntax and clauses thread. In any case, some sharing of knowledge, and some learning has taken place here, that's what it's really all about.

The state of emergency also prohibits news publicity in a way that terrifies the public.

-- The Nation 2008-08-02

I know this situation isn't funny . . . I had to take a bus up from Phuket cuz my flight was canceled (honest)! No, seriously, however strange this situation is, it really is a serious drag, and pretty scary, but I think everyone here understands that.

However, the semantic pedant within me just can't resist a poke at The Nation for the above sentence. One might well respond, " The poor public, receiving such a terrifying prohibition!" I hope the next time that the state of emergency, if it has to prohibit news publicity (whatever that is), will find a kinder, gentler way.

Hey there Big A

As someone who has studied Thai for many years, is pretty good at reading/writing, and has seen many systems, I think you would do well to follow the phonetic system they've got you going on, which sounds like the Mary Haas system from the '50s. I assume they use tone marks as well. That system is simple, completely accurate, and easy to look up in a glossary or dictionary.

All the romanized dictionaries, quite frankly, suck, and there are no good standards for them. As far as SAMPA, if it's as consistent as IPA, that would be fine, but I'm pretty sure there's nothing out there like that.

IPA is good, but it's not as easy to look stuff up in as the Haas system. I have created a dictionary just for myself (maybe someday I'll think about publishing) which uses a modified version of IPA for the phonetics which is closer to the Haas system than to actual IPA, which is more complex than is actually needed for the purpose.

If you mean it when you say you "read Thai well but haven't a clue about the tones," I really have to say you should rethink your concept. Tones are an absolutely essential part of the language, and of the writing system. If you don't understand tones, how can you tell the difference between the words for "rice" and "white," for instance, or "that's right" and "use?" Even if you hear the differences, you won't be able to tell them when reading unless you understand the tones and the rules for writing them in Thai.

The dictionary I always recommend to people is the Pocket Thai Dictionary (Periplus Pocket Dictionary) by Michael Golding. The link here is to a review of it I wrote on Amazon. You should be able to buy it at Asia Books.

My advice is to just learn the system they have given you, pick up that book, and start jammin away. I bet you'll like it once you get started.

-Montrii (Peter)

Hi

I am learning Thai at Bangkok Grace Polytechnic and am making good progress. However, in the lower levels, they teach new vocabulary in Phonetics (instead of Thai script or standard Roman script)

All vowels are in the phonetic script (like the schwa [upside-down e] and 'back-to-front' C) and the only consonant in phonetics is ('ŋ' for ng). Everything else is in standard Roman script.

Does anyone know where I can buy a Phonetic script (Thai words) - standard English (Roman) script dictionary?

Thanx in advance

Big A