Gaccha

"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"

- George Orwell, Animal Farm, Ch. 5

I have turned the first 3 paragraphs into an easy reading exercise for intermediate learners. I have put the Thai and English paragraph by paragraph, and then placed a transliteration of the Thai at the end.

Animal_Farm_first_three_paragraphs_in_Thai_and_English.pdf

(nothing special, just used the tools and technologies available on the internet)

This store and its sister store have just been busted by the ever-alert Thai police for renting pirated DVDs.

http://www.tannetwork.tv/

(see under Crime section: "Police Bust Pirated DVDs in Bangkok: Police bust a store in Bangkok for selling pirated DVDs. Seized items are said to be worth as much as 30 million baht.")

A real shame, since obviously there is no other way of getting this type of DVD...

Any updates ?

As in, will they survive the week...??

The wildly anticipated quarterly filings are now available at the Stock Exchange of Thailand website, telling a story of a company in wild freefall with a cash flow of minus 505 million baht in the third quarter... and revenue down a quarter on last year...

(http://www.set.or.th/set/companyfinance.do...&country=US)

So if you fancy a gamble you should throw money on the horse races in Royal Jockey Club. But if you want a *dead* certainty then lifetime membership at Cal Wow is the way to go... there is some astonishly frenetic trading this month in the shares... (84 million shares on 13 November traded)

OF COURSE Johnny made #1

Oh Johnny...Johnny...Johnny......

There go my chances with Eek. I always get told I look like Keanu Reeves.

Ah, I just spotted my typo and corrected it. Thanks. "Does" should have read "doesn't", but it seems you understood what I meant anyhow.

There's a difference between denotation and connotation. Roughly speaking, denotation means to state explicitly, and connotation means to imply or state implicitly. Usually a metaphor is implicit. Shakespeare wrote "All the world's a stage" -- he's making an implicitly metaphorical statement.

Adding "so to speak" makes it rhetorically explicit that one is being metaphorical, rather than just implying as much based on the context. At least, that's how I would put it.

Amusingly in modern vernacular, we can say "quite literally, all the world is a stage" despite this not possibly being the case (unless, of course, the whole world really is a stage). I have noticed an adaption of this which makes it at least logically correct: "it's literally like all the world is a stage" or the slightly varied meaning: "it's like literally all the world is a stage".

This adds not a dime to the debate, but is amusing.

given the derisive nature of your reply, not to bother contributing to your OPs in future (which no doubt will please you).

I post here only to remove a confusion: I didn't say the the concepts didn't exist in Thai, I said they were not used as rhetorical flourishes in Thai in the way that they are in English. A Thai teacher at AAA Pasawes School told me that, as did a private Thai teacher who speaks very good English. Are they both wrong? I don't know - I'm just sharing what I have been told.

'Furthermore, In addition, Moreover' etc are known as logical transitions. There are perfectly good equivalents of these in Thai and probably every other language I would suspect - but these weren't what either you or I were talking about.

ทำไมถึงคิดอย่างนั้นล่ะ

Relax, my friend. My comment of 'laughable' wasn't an aside against you, or your friends, it was a feeling I have for the game of language learning. I find within this system certain odd points constantly arise, often connected to the wrong decision of the teacher-agent to socially engineer. Words and ideas are denied to exist in the target language; the famous case is the bizarre insistence that Japanese does not have swear words. I am suggesting that your friends' positioning is almost certainly an element of the nature of teaching. I feel it inevitable that in 6 months time I will come across the exact words I wanted, Thai friends will grunt their misunderstanding of my original request for help and life will move on.

I really don't see what I have described as flourishes. Actually it is their ability to circumscribe a thought that makes them so practical.

Come on back in to the debate.

so to speak

Adverb

1. as if it were really so; "she lives here, as it were"

(synonym) as it were

2. in a manner of speaking; "the feeling is, as we say, quite dead"

(synonym) as we say

Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)So-called

(a.)

So named; called by such a name (but perhaps called thus with doubtful propriety).

This thread is bizarre. Just two days ago for the first time in an act of pure spite I decided to ruin a newcomers day after they got in a handbag fight with Neverdie. I giggled when I gave them their only rating, and now they proudly sit with a one star, just like me.

A couple of teachers have tried to knock this idea out of me. When I first started learning to write Thai at a school, I wanted to add the kind of rhetorical flourishes that I would use in English 'and another thing', 'besides', and, indeed some of the ones you give above.

Some Thai friends have provided me with equivalents of one or two after some pressing, but the response has always been the same: for the most part, these are not Thai expressions, and Thais often won't get them if you try to use them.

The only one I can think of that has a Thai counterpart (at least in writing, I'm not so good on colloquial speech)

is

'For starters' = the first thing (to do/ to say) ส่ิงแรก(ที่จะทำ / ที่จะบอก)

I think your confusing two points. A literal translation of the English will be barely comprehensible. But for Thai friends to claim the concepts don't exist/are not used in Thai is laughable.

'So-called' 'so to be speak': いわば　　いわゆる are perfectly translated into one word in japanese.

These are simple concepts that humans utilise to understand the world.

But in contradistinction, had you asked them how to say "and another thing" then it would seem bizarre if it was literal, but the concept is the same as "in addition", "futhermore" etc., and these are used all the time. I suspect your Thai friends simply didn't understand the request.

I note confiusion in the responses. I am driving at the tendency for English to use several words when one would be adequate.

There are some concepts that require a bunching of words in English, which make it impossible to find the concept in a dictionary, but also it is not then considered a grammar point. So for starters can I have these concepts translated to Thai please:

so to speak

so-called

in a sense

for starters

have a tendency to

Thanks, and I would like to see more listed if others can think of any...

I can't help but feel sorry for the bar.

Here they are trying to earn an honest living when all of a sudden the worst elements of humankind spill into their bar to watch them perform their daily night time shift activities.The bar must be so embarrassed by its association with British teenagers.

If I was the bar owner I would write a press release condemning Thailand in allowing the scum of the earth (British teenagers) into the country and violate the good bar scene of beloved Thailand, and expressing my hope that these teenagers can be contained in the vast human nursery called "the UK".

I don't think any of the links solve the issue I have with learning.

The two current options are Jamie's typing programme or the generically named 'Thai typing tutor'. The Jamie programme is an excellent spelling test but not so great for getting to grips with speed typing. The latter programme is so simple that it fails to live up to its purpose. I used it and still cannot touch type. I suspect anyone who now claims to touch type just eventually succeeded by thrashing away on msn etc.

Is there anything like the famous Mavis Beacon out there?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavis_Beacon

Clearly, in some way, the Thais feel ASEANish. Or at least you must otherwise come up with an explanation of why the nation-states of ASEAN have chroncially failed to invade each other. Yes, they have had their spats (Prear Vhear) , but they seem to live in peace.

But, yes, they feel Thai first and foremost. The nation-state with its monoploy of violence can in its desperate desire to project its own existence go to great lengths to make the people living within it feel part of it. The 72 (according to Chula Uni) races tha tmake up Thais have experienced incredible amounts of national myth making. How else could they feel anything but first and foremost Thai. Other countries also have similar simplistic systems of propagation of identity (e.g. US children standing and swearing their oath of allegiance). Only France and the UK are odd, interesting, and perhaps healthy exceptions (but this is well off topic).

So what is going on. Well, how about this positioning:

"The case of the EU points to the need to re-conceptualise the relationship between

self and other in the IR literature. I argue that the literature forces us into an artificial choice

between the liberal constructivist approach of disregarding the constitutive role of difference

in identity formation and the critical constructivist approach of assuming a behavioural

relationship between self and other, and therefore cannot account for the diversity in the EU’s

interactions with various states on its periphery. I identify three constitutive dimensions along

which self/other relationships vary to produce or not produce relationships of Othering:

nature of difference, social distance, and response of other. "

---Constructing identity and relating to difference: understanding the EU’s mode of differentiation by BAHAR RUMELILI, Review of International Studies (2004), 30, 27–47

So the Other (ie. non-Thais in our topic, usually Farang, but historically the great non-Thai was the Burmese) should not be immediately seen as the hostile Other. Add I think this can be seen in Thai relations with Malaysia, Cambodia etc.

If we raise the intellectual bar a bit, I strongly recommend this:

'Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity'-- Judith Butler

After you've read that it will be difficult to take any of these Cosmopolitan magazine-style books seriously again. I appreciate that , for some, 'Men are from mars...' can be a 'good laugh' as it picks up on certain superficial observations and then repeats them, but if you want to know what is actually going on you need to read the Butler classic. Sometimes, the truth can be hardgoing.

Um, this is assuming that radical French feminist theory has had a major impact on gender relations worldwide. Nobody thinks we are the same, but I, for one, do not see why treating people equally is so disturbing for some people.

Crikey, I don't think for a minute the theory has had any impact on gender relations. If it had, the book would be now redundant. The point of the book is to examine the performativity of not only gender, but of sex and sexuality. To grotesquely parody her position, she sees us all in a constant drag performance. What you see as being a man, or being male, she regards as not only constituted by social relations, but the very performativity of it. So perhaps your examination of what makes your male friends/boyfriends/ husbamd tick is to actually generate the tick itself.

If we raise the intellectual bar a bit, I strongly recommend this:

'Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity'-- Judith Butler

After you've read that it will be difficult to take any of these Cosmopolitan magazine-style books seriously again. I appreciate that , for some, 'Men are from mars...' can be a 'good laugh' as it picks up on certain superficial observations and then repeats them, but if you want to know what is actually going on you need to read the Butler classic. Sometimes, the truth can be hardgoing.

The basic point I'm making is Thailand was never Thailand, so it didn't exist to be colonized... It's a bit like saying Slovakia has never been colonized and leaving it there; ignoring thousands of years of movement and different ruling groups.

Right. And just to add to this point, the mainstream position on Thailand is that it underwent dramatic 'internal colonisation'.

Ask yourself what makes a nation-state a nation-state. Bearing in mind, it exists only insofar as it is constituted in the minds of the people within the map boundaries. If all but a tiny number are slaves, what does it matter why the land was not taken by the Europeans. You are fetishing a concept not relevant to the time or place. It is like asking why dinosaurs did not have democracy. The implication by raising the topic of epic Thai resistance to colonisation, is that it is something to be proud of.

This was one of the great unmentioned parts of the Hurricane Katrina story. The fridges absolutely stunk. They defrosted, maggots began swarming, the smell was utterly rancid with 2 or 3 inches thick goo around the walls of the fridge and in the freezer bags, black frozen maggots. The solution then was to chuck the fridges away.

On the bright side, the smell of a decaying human body of 3 months is not as bad as an egg left for 3 months, so should you ever come across the former (as I have) then you might not be so shocked thanks to your current experience.

"When you're young, anyone a decade older or more can seem like a gauche joke, tragically unaware of their own crashing irrelevance. They're either hopelessly out-of-touch (LOL! He's never heard of Lady Gaga!), embarrassingly immature (Ugh! He listens to Lady Gaga!) or hovering awkwardly in-between (Pff! He uses Lady Gaga as a catch-all reference for youth!)."

---The Guardian (12 October 2009)

The comic timing of this Guardian article with this Thaivisa topic is poetry itself.

The One Stop Visa shop located 150metres from MRT exit 3 of Phahon Yothin at Rasa Tower 2, which is now by far the best place for 90 day reports (since the new Immigration Office is sooooo inconvenient) if you live in central bangkok and want to use the MRT or BTS only.

But now it is also moving. But it is good news. On January 4th it is moving to just next to Siam Square... ( am unable to recall the exact location but it is posted on the front entrance on the 16th floor at Rasa Tower 2, something like "Chatumak Tower")

Perfect. Clearly God is a Scotsman after all.

No doubt the information will seep out the closer the date.

http://www.thaivisa.com/359.0.html

This has for people with 1 year visa or better the following ramifications:

1. if renewing the visa you'll need to head to the new Immigration Office

2. if you are just doing the tedious and totally pointless 90 day reports you can pop into the office near Siam Square

Ok I get the picture I must be the most misunderstood guy in the world.I read all your replies and to be honest see l;ittle in them relating to what was on my mind when I started this thread or the last one. So I willsimply give up trying to make sense with you guys .

Strictly speaking your unseen Thai person problematised the bar girl, rather than yourself, so you protect yourself from asserting any opinion. Indeed, you provide your opinion as a source of assistance for us farang who are apparently constantly being asked by your unseen Thai party "Why do farang always marry bar girl". Well, perhaps it is always more interesting to turn the question back on the questioner.

When Thais say bar girls they have something special in mind. Although a great deal of the young (boys and) girls working as bar girls are actually university students of the elite universities and the not so elite colleges the Thais are resolutely not talking about them. They have in mind the ladies mainly from Issan who are forced by the invasion of late modern capitalism to destroy their old tight-knit community life and work in the diaspora of Issan people in the horrible trades of Bangkok: many a construction worker is an Issan lady, many a toilet cleaner.

The Thais clearly regard the bar girls as sinners, hence why they raise the issue to you (although not to me, not once, not even once) and that is what "to problematise it" means: to hold your frame of reference by a certain contingency. Your response is to attribute behavioural traits for the Thais and the farang to explain a problem that you create.

My response, au contraire, would be look at the mechanisms of late capitalism , the violent hypocrisy in the male upper classes in claiming not to partake in the vices, and the total lack of honesty in viewing the Issan girls as equalling bar girls. I have yet to meet any hi-so friends of mine who do not partake in the vices available and I feel they are a normal crowd.

The non-night worker girls often have curfews and are subject to strict regimes to suppress their sexual beings. Enormous social pressures deny them access to farang despite the recent fashion for the farang man.

So "why do farang marry Thai bar girls?". To answer this unseen Thai man:

a. the question is never asked (Thais do not think this)

b. is it because of smoking and drinking similarities? (no- it is a confluence of factors ranging from capitalist exploitation to old style patriarchy)

This is a tricky balance. Bonobo, even before he was a moderator, was my favourite contributor. I cannot mention and don't mention his reason for stopping your last topic. Indeed I am not allowed to do so. But I want you to note that you were not 'targetted' by your topic being described as trolling.

He made a hard call. I don't think you are necessarily of evil intent in posting what you posted, but I fear it goes down such an obvious series of narratives that you it is doomed to drop into a rant. Had you reframed your position it might have stood a chance. As it was you did this:

You problematised the type of women that farang men marry in Thailand (why did you choose to do this?)

You appear to associate women's desparate need for resources as a form or moral failure (an arguable position)

You used the conceptual framework of class (you seem to have not noticed you used two meanings of class: 'classy' and 'class of social status' )

You assumed a preference for the middle class, upper class girl (and assumed they are superior)

You assumed the vices are the problems of the lower classes only

You naively assumed Thais who marry up the social ladder do not suffer such vices (since they told you so)

You were inviting a narrative that is inherently insulting, since your assumptions are twisted away from reality. I just never seem to meet these men who are falling off bar stools trying to take in their next drug trip, who then stagger home, to have SM with their barn chicken, before exploding from the gluttony they suffer as a consequnce of marrying a woman of low morals. I just keep meeting gentlemen with nice wives who quietly get on with their lives.

just testing if MP3 will up-load.

opalhort

15___Take_Me_Home.mp3

appears to have uploaded.

Edit: just tested it and yes the up-load went through okay.

Try to insert it into the text editor after up-load is complete.

Tried and tried and nothing.

So I split the file in two. And it seems to have worked...

So the lesson from this is: any more than 7mb and it might get bounced despite the 20mb limit.

You can see the end result in the "Thai language" forum.

"Generations to come will scarcely believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth."--Albert Einstein

If Ghandi was... Thai and female then this is what he would sound like.

I got a friend to read out parts of the script as well as the introduction for the astonishing 1982 film (it won 8 oscars) in the Thai translation.

Download the attached MP3 file here:

Ghandi_by_Jia_part_1b.mp3

Ghandi_by_Jia_part_2b.mp3

The English language is here for the whole film: http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Gandhi.html (just use 'find' by Ctrl + F)

Scene 1.

Ghandi: Doesn't the New Testament say, "If your enemy strikes you on the right cheek, offer him the left"?

Charlie: I think perhaps the phrase was used metaphorically... I don't think our Lord meant --

Ghandi: I'm not so certain. I have thought about it a great deal. I suspect he meant you must show courage -- be willing to take a blow -- several blows -- to show you will not strike back -- nor will you be turned aside... And when --....

Scene 2

Ghandi: I am asking you to fight -- ! To fight against their anger -- not to provoke it!....

Scene 3

Ghandi: Since I returned from South Africa, I have traveled over much of India. And I know I could travel many more years and still only see a small part of it....

Scene 4

Ghandi: We think it is time you recognized that you are masters in someone else's home. Despite the best intentions of the best of you, you must, in the nature of things, humiliate us to control us.....

Scene 5

Reporter: ...The object of this massive tribute died as he had always lived -- a private man without wealth, without property, without official title or office...

More about the film: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandhi_(film)

The Thai script is available in the book: "Learn English with movies" published by MIS Studio. A book that is readily available in almost all medium or large size bookshops in Bangkok.

[and like Ghandi I went through great suffering to get this to you-- about 30 upload attempts, a re-editing of the sound, a 'cleaning' of the MP3 and so on. So you better download it... or I'll burn my ID card]

I want to upload a 9mb MP3 (it is about 12 min long of audio). I have tried to upload around 20 times.

I have ensured the problems of uploading are not on my side of the fence; I have checked the codecs of the MP3. It is normal. I then 'cleaned' the MP3 by 'converting' it back into an MP3 (from MP3 to MP3). This usually works to kill off all buggy aspects of it. The file is of course ".mp3". The Forum should just accept the uploaded file.

Please can you check there is not some problem with the Forum uploads. When it fails to upload it always says: "You did not select a file to upload".

I am getting awfully exasperated.

In case it was just a short term problem I aborted after 17 tries yesterday. But today it is still not working....

Thanks iin advance.

Not sure how much this wiII heIp you at this stage but if you have (or can get) an account opened with HSBC, they do send cards and maiI to overseas addresses. However, ive been with HSBC a Iong time, not sure if that changes anything.

I second this. HSBC will send to your address in Thailand or they will send the card by internal mail to their Bangkok branch for you to collect. In either case they are very careful. They rang me on their initiative to see if it had arrived at their Bangkok branch when I picked the latter option, as they pointed out they have no communication with each other (Bangkok and London branches). Brutual honesty, that might explain Barclays reluctance to suggest the same solution.

Behind the Blur:

Uncovering Thai Cinema

Written & Directed by Erich Fleshman

72 minutes

Thursday, 01 October 2009

20:30 - 22:00

Rain Dogs Bar & Gallery

Soi Phraya Phiren, Rama IV Rd

Admission free

An insightful documentary about Thai cinema, which boasts a long and colourful history, yet struggles as the industry attempts to move forward. This film examines the past but focuses mainly on the Thai New Wave since 1997 by combining film clips and interviews from Thai directors and others artists, such as Asian hip-hop sensation Thaitanium, who are trying to create a more personal style of art.

Would have loved to have seen this. But 'tis too late. Are there any other showings?

And about this Rain Dogs Bar, what type of place is it? A swanky arty bar? Sounds interesting.