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Posted

only when they make no effort to try to fill in the blanks, or try to help me out with what little english they have.

 

thank god for google images and google translate, but google translate sucks with sentences

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Posted

My mumbled one- and two-word attempts are greeted by my family with cheerful understanding (giggle giggle). Anything beyond that would be beyond either them or me.

 

But I am resolved - once I've finished improving my Cherman and teaching myself to read Spanish literature fluently - to take up Thai seriously before I reach 80. 5 years to go.

Posted

I have only started learning in the last three months so it happens more often than not.

 

it is my fault, not theirs, so will it might be a little frustrating for me I am not annoyed by the helpful Thai people.

 

Putting on your constipated face really won’t help here, they will just think you are another farang idiot.

 

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Posted
1 hour ago, simon43 said:

Anyway, the only way to complete my transaction was in English...

or at another hotel :smile:

Posted
5 minutes ago, grain said:

If I'm alone I don't have any problem speaking Thai with them, we can chat away and cover many subjects, and they'll tell me what a wonderful Thai speaker I am, and I'm now a Thai, no longer a farang, but if my Thai wife is with me all of a sudden they haven't a fkn clue what I'm saying and have to bring her in as a translator. 

 

One gets the impression that they think this farang is too stupid to understand what he is saying.😁

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Posted
7 minutes ago, Gecko123 said:

encountering the occasional Thai speaker who has brain freeze when a non-native speaker speaks Thai is something that I am extremely confident even the most highly proficient non-native speakers experience on occasion.

 

So do most of those who are not "highly proficient" non-native speakers on even more occasions. In other words, it's irrelevant the notion of "hightly proficient" when it comes to non-native vs native (fluency of the language.) The locals still hear something foreign, and some don't like to deal with it. You are the foreigner, not them.

 

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Posted
2 hours ago, simon43 said:

 

The point being, I'm pretty sure that she didn't understand my spoken Thai was because her brain didn't expect a western foreigner to speak Thai

Make sure you finish with a kaap. 

 

Throw in as many Kaap's as possible, makes it a little easier for them to adjust, they are not expecting you to talk Thai. 

 

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Posted
38 minutes ago, Gecko123 said:

 

It is my strong suspicion that if you yourself enjoyed any degree of fluency in Thai you would have long ago disabused yourself of that notion. The experience of being very easily understood by most Thai speakers and then encountering the occasional Thai speaker who has brain freeze when a non-native speaker speaks Thai is something that I am extremely confident even the most highly proficient non-native speakers experience on occasion.

 

That's a different point altogether.I agree that occasionally a Thai is shocked into silence when a foreigner speaks or attempts to speak Thai.If we are going to digress on this matter I would also add Thai airline staff/hotel employees etc who insist on speaking English.But my original observation holds.

Posted
2 hours ago, watthong said:

 

Absolutely, it also annoys me when someone claims that he could speak  "Thai to a high level", and when the local Thais don't understand them, he turns around and asks if they speak their own language. That is what I called "conceited" - a word I believe is widely used among the "master"-class

My wife continue to tell me for every foreigner we meet who claim they speak fluently Thai, they do not. All this years only one who never claimed he do, speaks as close as fluently a foreigner not born there can do. He have been a manager and living in Thailand for 12 years now. 

 

For OP most likely Burmese or Canbodian 

Posted
6 minutes ago, Gecko123 said:

You've touched upon a variety of other reasons why assessments of speaking ability made by Thais can be biased and not necessarily reliable:

 

(1) A Thai person who has an inflated opinion of their own ability to speak English and who feels competitive with everyone else in terms of foreign language proficiency can unfairly judge a foreigner's proficiency;

 

(2) a Thai person who wants to practice their English and denigrates or willfully frustrates communication in Thai in order to steer the conversation to English;

 

(3) a Thai person who has established themself as the designated 'English-speaker' in front of their peers, (even though their proficiency may actually be quite low) and who view attempts at speaking Thai with them as a humiliation in front of their peer group;

 

(4) a Thai spouse who has learned from experience that their non-Thai speaking spouse gets moody and jealous if another foreigner speaks Thai with them, and for this reason, in order to soothe the insecurities of the spouse, they downplay how well the foreigner speaks Thai, or refuse to conversationally engage with the foreigner at all.

Well, she let's me know if someone on YouTube speaks fluently, I think it is more to some foreigners ego and who did put down some effort to learn the language, and nobody tells him he do not speaks not fluently. 

 

If someone speaks fluently, why do they have to tell me? It is some of the first things foreigners say after how long they lives here, and I did not even ask 😁

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