Johpa

I think all thais need to carefully study the 20th century history of Iran

Uh, why yes of course, one can see some vague similarities between the rise of post war strongmen taking political control with assistance from still obscure machinations from US influence. That being said, Iran and Thailand represent very different nation-states so the end results, equally unanticipated and as yet not played out fully in Thailand, will differ dramatically.

But how can Thailand teach anything other than hagiographic history based upon the pongsawadans (chronicles) when the truth is that most Thais were either slaves, living in wilderness areas to escape slavery until slavery was abolished in the late 19th century, or relocated prisoners of war.

Sorry "Johpa", you gotta read those posts a little closer before using the ‘fast reply’ button . You've confused me with a post made by "Murf" which I quoted in the body of my response.

Sorry, sometime the ol' graduated bifocals cause some minor confusion when there are multiple embedded posts being quoted. Just thought your choice of transliteration within your moniker was a bit humorous, admittedly very sophomoric humor on my part, within a discussion of transliteration of Thai names.

Maeng Mao are termites that spawn once a year, usually soon after the first heavy rains. In the forested hill areas, such as where I have a home outside of Chiang Mai, they spawn by the millions, most spawning during a single day. They literally fill the air and carpet the ground. It does make for an interesting if rather unpleasant day as you can not really open your mouth to eat during the onset. But they are quite harmless. Watch the dragonflies attack and feat upon them.

When i started teaching.....

And do you use the same moniker in class Mr. Tod?

We should remember one thing. Thais are trained to memorise. They memorise their own dialect and they memorise the central dialect. They memorise reading and writing. That is also why Thais aren't used to / aren't good at reading out sounds from written letters. They are simply not used to do it. That is also why it sometimes even seems like they forget the connection between letters and sound. It's not necessarily there in the first place

It may be argued that the Thai education system is overly reliant upon rote memorization, but rest assured that young Thais enter the schools at the age of 5 already quite fluent in their mother tongue and usually, thanks to the media, understanding Central Thai, without having had to resort to rote memorization, or any formal training what so ever, just like every other child on the planet.

I have found that nearly all literate Thai can read out loud, but just as with speakers of other languages, that is a skill on its own that improves with practice. Compare my reading aloud skills with that of an elementary school teacher and I come out rather poorly.

I am just curious as to why someone of apparently substantial means and who can afford to retire relatively young, would build a retirement villa in a tourist center such as Samui. It would be akin to retiring on Waikiki. Samui is a great place to visit, has opportunities for tourist generated income, but is not the place that I would imagine for a retirement location. At least the OP was smart with his money early on to balance out the lack of common sense on retiring into a tourist-we-are out-to-get-you location. I can see how Cambodia or Vietnam would be far more sensible options, but it doesn't really reflect upon Thais in general as rest assured the future tourist centers in those two countries will have the same issues as Samui once fully matured.

The short answer is no, the police will not often get involved in a case of mental illness in the rural areas unless it involves a very serious offense such as an assault with a weapon. Domestic issues inside the family, including theft and domestic assault within the family, are left to the family to deal with. Often, alas, it is left up to the puuyai baan and the other locals to determine the amount of prejudice levied upon the crazy one and often the decision is to simply grin and bear it.

Two weeks before they are due to fly, a lot of airlines get the 'jitters' that they will be flying with empty seats and in this economic climate they want every penny they can get and therefore sell them off cheaply, rather than fly empty. (see TG super deals as example Super Deals)

It seems that if you can hold your nerve, often you will find a good deal two weeks or sooner before departure.

Not of caution that most of the seats out of Taipei to North America are pretty well booked up for the summer. The only way my wife was recently able to change a return ticket was by paying for an upgrade in class.

Although no longer the most politically correct methodology for teaching a foreign language, I am one of the older generation who was successfully taught Thai using Brown's AUA course. And someday I will find Nick's restaurant.

Yes many of us have the same problem with this and other words where one letter is silent.

All native English speakers struggle with the syllable initial /ng/ consonant. There is no silent letter here, this is a recognized consonant which shows up in English as a final consonant but is written with two letters in the Roman alphabet as are other consonants such as /th/ or/sh/. (English uses some 28 consonants using a alphabet with only 20 some consonant characters) But with practice, slowly removing the first half of a short English syllable with the /ng/ ending (sing, bang, bong, etc) you will get the hang of it. It took me almost a year to get it to come out without feeling that I was choking.

With all due humility, would it be too much to suggest that trying to fit Thai thought into English tenses implies that inside the Thai thought is the same sense of linearity of time that is inherent in English. I'm not sure that Thais conceive time in the same linear way we do. For example, try putting this line from a 70's song into Thai "And I wonder if you know that I never understood. Even though you'd said you'd go, until you left, I'd never thought you would".

I think that "Thai time" is how the majority of the planet perceive the role of time and that "Farang time", a retentive reliance upon the clock, is the minority viewpoint. That being said, Thai has a single tense and English has but two true tenses. And both languages get pretty darn subtle in indicating other aspects of time perception, but native speakers have no problems conveying such intricacies to one another and learners of each respective language struggle over the same issues.

Basically I think that the government want's to keep the poor, poor and uneducated then they are no threat to the thai elite's way of life.

The same holds true in the US where the public education system is a sea of mediocrity. Sure the wealthier neighborhoods are able to attract and hire the best of the bunch, and yes there are some really amazing individuals who are willing to challenge both themselves and the system by seeking work in poorer neighborhoods. But overall public education around the world is a sea of mediocrity, with low political priority and pathetic funding. The teachers are happy to enjoy tax-payer subsidized health care and retirement benefits, and enjoy all the kiddie holidays possible, especially summer vacation. The primary rule is not to rock the boat. The elite do not want competition from the masses so they send their kids to the private schools, both in Thailand and in the west where their children get the education and the economic backing to succeed and enter the elite colleges.

But don't put too much into these exam results. Some 25 years ago I was involved in a graduate research project in the US that administered the university's English proficiency exam to native speakers. Foreign students who failed to achieve a certain level of proficiency were required to take additional ESL classes at an additional expense to normal tuition, thus providing employment to graduate students like myself. Yet 30% of the native speakers failed to achieve that same minimal proficiency.

So before you criticize Thailand reflect back upon your home country to see if it is substantively any better in funding public education.

So on my occasional visits into Chiang Mai from my home it was already bad enough to have to pass by walled haciendas that were once open fields and orchards, and signs with directions to local yuppie spas. But I think the sign proclaiming the "chic ashram" now takes the cake for neo-sahib pretentiousness. Alas, I have so far been unsuccessful in convincing the wife to sell everything and relocate up to Wat Chan.

All I can say that if you are hearing ก kai as a voiced /g/ sound and not a /k/ sound then you need to train your ear and brain a bit better. For English speakers try slowing down any single syllable word beginning with /sk/ such as sky or skate or ski, and then slowly removing the s without re-aspirating the /k/. Take a piece of paper and hold it in front of your mouth and practice until the sheet does not blow (aspirate) when you articulate the /k/ sound. Competency will come with practice. Be patient.

On the little arrow to the right of your Name, to the left of My Settings, you can Click 'My Contents'. There you can view your last 100's of Posts. Prepare to underwhelmed!

Not nearly as useful as the former "My Assistant" that allowed one to go directly to one's last 10 posts. This function only lets you see the thread, and then one must hunt down the last post to see the responses. Thus I join with the others who would like to see the functionality of "My Assistant" drop down menu returned. I urge the admins to reconsider this issue.

I stand corrected and apologize to the admins as this function does indeed take you to your last post in a thread. Change is sometimes difficult for middle aged curmudgeons to accept with grace.

On the little arrow to the right of your Name, to the left of My Settings, you can Click 'My Contents'. There you can view your last 100's of Posts. Prepare to underwhelmed!

Not nearly as useful as the former "My Assistant" that allowed one to go directly to one's last 10 posts. This function only lets you see the thread, and then one must hunt down the last post to see the responses. Thus I join with the others who would like to see the functionality of "My Assistant" drop down menu returned. I urge the admins to reconsider this issue.

.....Bill Gates wouldn't have sunk billions of dollars into malaria research if we could simply paint everyone with DEET for a few months.

I suggest you peruse the Gates Foundation websiteto better understand the thinking behind that worthy effort to eradicate malaria and not just prevent malaria, which is what repellents aim to do. Painting the world's population in a daily chemical bath every few hours is not a long term practical solution nor an affordable solution. Part of the Gates Foundation efforts to eradicate malaria are being channeled to Dr. Elias' PATH organization. Dr. Elias maintains a residence in Bangkok, so you might some day be able to attend a presentation in Thailand on the status of the Gates Foundation's efforts.

The tenor of this thread seems to be that Thai Buddhism is already largely ceremonial.

Well what do you expect from the neo-sahibs who populate these boards whilst living in their condos or red tiled roof faux mubaans? These posters know little of the lives in the true mubaans, a village defined by the existence of a local temple. Some posters are even unaware that Thailand is surrounded by fellow Theravada Buddhists. And then one poster even equated Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddhism practiced in the culturally distinct East Asia as being similar to Christian Protestantism. But then again we have a monk, or the translator of the monk, talking about, within a Buddhist context, of Thais lacking faith. And if there is one Judeao-Christian-Muslim religious aspect that is blissfully missing in all forms of Buddhism it is the removal of "faith" from the religious mix. And just as a language is a dialect with an army behind it, a religion is a cult with an army behind it.

In short, this thread, including the original article, is so far off track and contains so much ignorance that there is really nowhere to go.

จับสึก (jap seuk). Definitely negative in inference. To be forced to disrobe.

Bingo! 260,000 hits on Google and lots of lurid monk tales.

Thanks!

Well that is because we all know that the Thai Sangha was founded by a group of English vicars cast a sail for misdeeds centuries ago.

Many years ago in my village the local monk disrobed himself, in the presence of a local lass, and was literally chased down the road by the locals.

Mosquito repellents are only marginally effective.

Poppycock! DEET is very effective, as are many other repellents. The fact that they are not 100% effective is no reason to imply they are only "marginally" effective. Only a fool would reside within a disease prone area without applying such a repellent. In areas with high incidences of mosquito borne disease one should take multiple steps to prevent infection including repellents, nets, mosquito coils (pyrethrum) and prophylactic drugs.

The most interesting thing about Pali numbers is that, because they are derived from the same Indo-European root language as English and all Romance languages (among others), many of the numbers find echoes in English. Tho is two, of course, trii is three.

Not only are the words cognates, but the symbols used as the numerical diacritical tone marks are the same as the Arabic numerals we use, although two need to be rotated 90 degrees.

This is starting to look like Burma of a few years ago. The military already had a firm hold on government in Burma, Myramar, but squashed the uprising, killing 1200 Monks in the bloody crack down. Is Thailand going the same way as Burma? I hope not, but I do not think it would take that much.

Ridiculous! Thailand may be your basic vanilla Southeast Asian variety banana Republic, but for all its faults it remains a far cry from the complete totalitarain regime that is Burma.

The puppeteer strings are very long here in Thailand.....

They are also intertwined.

There are a few misconceptions in the original article. First, although most rural folks own the land under their modest homes, a large percentage, sometimes up to 50% in any one tambon, rent their padi land. Second most rural folks are greatly underemployed. Wages in many rural regions for casual labor remain at just over 100 baat per day. Although true poverty is not as common as it once was, it still exists throughout Isaan and up in the minority villages up north. But most families, despite having their cell phones, satellite TVS, and electric fans inside their modest homes, are always just one small misfortune away, from going back into a state of poverty. One of my brother-in-laws has one of the largest homes in his village although due to a combination of poor decision making, less than robust health, and debt, now lives in a big empty shell. The largest house in the village is now domicile to one of the poorest residents of the village.

The comparisons to cohorts in North America is laughable. No carpenter in the US would want to be living on the edge of poverty that a rural carpenter in Thailand exists upon on a daily basis. Rural Thai carpenters do have a skill, but most often are greatly underemployed, and in fact tend to work in carpentry only a few months out of the year at best. And comparing farmers, please spare me. There are few enough true farmers left in in the US apart from the large corporate farmers who are contracted out by the few large processors such as ADM, and who survive only because of the government subsidies (US farmers live a socialist dream yet vote Republican, so don't think that Thai farmers supporting a megalomaniac like Thaksin is all that strange) due to the strange political structure in the US which gives the vast Midwest farmlands unwarranted over representation in the US Senate.

The writer of the piece is clearly observing rural Thailand from the outside with little real understanding of life in the villages. One can easily define unemployment in a manner that leads to a low number, but fails to capture the reality of endemic underemployment. The author finds other statistics to build up his/her neo-sahib views of the rural class (oh my, I could not find me a plumber), but as one who has spent many a year in the rural north, I find little of his tone to ring true.

Only the bribed being Labour strongholds of the ones on Welfare, immigrants and public sector/state workers who are sucking the milk of the State tit...

Couldn't agree more.

Unlike the multinationals and wealthy individuals who relocate their profits overseas to avoid paying taxes. And of course London's financial district denizens would not have had any culpability in the now very sad state of affairs of Mother England.

Oh well, glad to see that some pommies wear the same blinders as their Tory brethren in my own country who wage political warfare under the Republican banner.