Does it annoy you when a Thai person doesn't understand your spoken Thai?

[simon43]

I'm not talking about 'pidgin' Thai.  This is a question for those of us who can speak Thai to a high level.

 

I just had one of those experiences, at a hotel on Koh Lanta.  I wandered in and asked if they had any available rooms and what the price was.  The reception lady looked at me completely blank.  I repeated my request and got the same response.  I therefore said in slowly-spoken English 'Do you speak Thai?'.  (Actually, I was 99% sure that the woman was Thai, and this was my way of winding her up!).  Yes, there are many Burmese working in Thailand, but I was pretty sure that she was Thai.

 

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

 

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. The hotel had many Swedish tourists and I'm sure the poor lady was trying to decipher my utterances as some form of English spoken with a thick Swedish accent!

 

 

Edited August 4 by simon43

[rocketboy2]

Yes.

Is it a big issue. for me,  no.

 

 

Edited August 4 by rocketboy2

[KhunLA]

Not annoy me, but do wonder why some understand me perfectly, and others haven't a clue what I said.  Not like I'm in deep conversation with them, just ordering food at restaurant or simple shopping questions.

[BritManToo]

These people probably don't speak central Thai as a first language, so find it hard to understand when accented.

 

I've become used to Lanna Thai speakers, and find it much harder to understand Bangkok Thai speakers.

Edited August 4 by BritManToo

[simon43]

1 minute ago, KhunLA said:

Not annoy me, but do wonder why some understand me perfectly, and others haven't a clue what I said.  Not like I'm in deep conversation with them, just ordering food at restaurant or simple shopping questions.

Perhaps 'annoy' is a tad too strong, but it does give me an opportunity to demonstrate my warped sense of British humour by slowly saying "Do you speak Thai?".  Perhaps I can rub it in next time by slowly saying "Are you from Burma"?  🙂

[simon43]

Just now, BritManToo said:

These people probably don't speak central Thai as a first language, so find it hard to understand when accented.

Are you suggesting that my spoken Thai is accented?!!  I can speak Thai as good as Churchill speaking French - even a little better!

[jayboy]

16 minutes ago, simon43 said:

This is a question for those of us who can speak Thai to a high level.

 

Invariably when a foreigner is surprised that his attempts to speak Thai result in bafflement, his grasp of the language is rather less secure than he imagines.I've noticed this countless times over the decades.

[watthong]

8 minutes ago, jayboy said:

 

Invariably when a foreigner is surprised that his attempts to speak Thai result in bafflement, his grasp of the language is rather less secure than he imagines.I've noticed this countless times over the decades.

 

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

[Pouatchee]

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

[simon43]

20 minutes 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

I'm sure that there are many foreigners who think that their Thai language abilities are better than they really are.  However, I'm pretty sure that my Thai is very good, as demonstrated by the 99.99% of Thais who have no problem to understand me immediately when I speak Thai 🙂

 

What is also clear is that you do not understand my very dry, very British SoH!

[mfd101]

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.

[MalcolmB]

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.

 

[sirineou]

1 hour ago, simon43 said:

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

or at another hotel 

[grain]

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. 

[impulse]

The title of the OP tickled me because of the many times I've been with Thai people, a white guy says something in Thai, and when he leaves they ask me what language he was speaking.

 

[BE88]

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.😁

[jayboy]

56 minutes ago, simon43 said:

However, I'm pretty sure that my Thai is very good,

 

We will never know.

 

Still, I have known quite a few farang who speak excellent Thai (to the extent they are non distinguishable from an educated Thai) and a common feature is that they never ever boast about it.

[Gecko123]

1 hour ago, jayboy said:

 

Invariably when a foreigner is surprised that his attempts to speak Thai result in bafflement, his grasp of the language is rather less secure than he imagines.I've noticed this countless times over the decades.

 

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.

Edited August 4 by Gecko123

[OneMoreFarang]

1 hour 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. The hotel had many Swedish tourists and I'm sure the poor lady was trying to decipher my utterances as some form of English spoken with a thick Swedish accent!

 

That is definitely something that happens. If we expect A and hear B, then B is not part of what we expect.

 

Apart from that, I know many foreigners who live since many years in Thailand, and they speak Thai. And 90% of their conversations are with their wife/gf or other people who talk to them all the time. And those people who listen to them all the time understand their Thai.

 

But then, if the same people with their "family Thai" use that language with another Thai person, then that suddenly does not work anymore. A little wrong pronunciation is enough for no understanding. I heard a couple of those guys in restaurants. The Thai staff try to understand them, but often the pronunciation is so bad that they just don't understand. And then they switch to English.

 

And yes, I include myself in above. My gf understands my Thai. Some other Thais understand it as well, but others not so much. I don't blame Thais if they don't understand my Thai. 

[watthong]

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.

 

[Lacessit]

I speak with my GF in Thai. She understands me perfectly, because she is so used to my mode of speech.

 

I get some Thais who understand me, others who don't. I accept I will never be fluent, it doesn't worry me. The tones are just too difficult without years of practice.

 

With the Thais that don't understand me, I call my GF on my mobile, she then gets the message across.

 

When you've got a language where the word for knee, rice and the color white all sound the same.....there are dozens of examples like that.

[Gecko123]

1 hour 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

Asking someone if someone speaks Thai is a perfectly legitimate question. Someone can look Thai, perhaps even be Thai, and not speak the language. Also, asking them if they speak Thai, if they in fact do speak Thai, serves to jolt them into realizing that they understood the question you just asked them in Thai. Asking someone in a condescending or annoyed tone if they speak Thai can be discourteous, but politely asking in a friendly tone if they speak Thai is perfectly acceptable, nothing conceited or arrogant about it at all.

 

My point in my earlier post is that there are some foreigners who have a very low level of proficiency in Thai who are very judgmental about other foreigners ability with the language, and who often make snap judgements about someone's ability based on "whether they 'sound like' a native speaker or whether the native speaker understands them. The point I was making is that just because a native speaker fails to understand you or another non-native speaker does not automatically reflect poorly on their proficiency level, and anyone - including you - had they achieved a high degree of proficiency would have experienced this phenomena, and the fact that they - and you and jay boy - don't realize this tells me that it highly likely that your proficiency in the language isn't that high.

[SAFETY FIRST]

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. 

 

Edited August 4 by SAFETY FIRST

[BritManToo]

I always pretend I don't understand when Thais try to speak English to me. Doesn't matter how good their English is.

[jayboy]

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.

[Hummin]

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 

[Gecko123]

57 minutes ago, Hummin said:

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 

You've reminded of 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 refuses to conversationally engage in Thai with the foreigner at all.

 

Edited August 4 by Gecko123

[bubblegum]

Around here its no use talking in Thai. They all speak Kmer.

[simon43]

Right, I was out and about this morning and I went into a hardware store.

 

Speaking only Thai, I asked "Do you have 100 metres of single-strand copper wire, 1.5mm diameter, with black plastic insulation?"

 

The Thai man looked at me blankly and asked in English "What do you want?"

 

So I repeated my phase in Thai, at the same pace as I just spoke (ie normal speaking pace).

 

You could almost see the light-bulb light up in the guy's brain 🙂 He smiled and showed me his choice and wire, asked more questions about what I planned to do with it and - as you can see - I walked out of the shop having had a successful conversation!!

 

[Hummin]

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 😁