Why can't Thai's give/follow travel directions?

[Thormaturge]

We recently drove to Phuket and back from Bangkok and I had set up the GPS.

She who shall remain nameless chose to argue with the GPS.

Having chosen to follow the GPS instructions, which were correct and differed totally from hers, I was then confronted with accusations that I never listen to what she says.

[Radar501]

I was showing a Thai girl a map of the world which had Europe and Africa on the left side of the page and The Americas on the right.

We were chatting about the route that aircraft fly between London and New York. No matter how many ways I tried to illustrate it, she was unable to compute that by travelling west from London, past the left-hand edge of the page, you end up on the right-hand edge of the same page.

The Flat Earth Society lives.

[bitcoinbob]

in western countries it is ok to say i dont know,- not here that is why directions are so convolute even when they both speak thai. now take that a step further when you are explaining verbally in thai something very difficult , my friend has pilates studios all over asia, bangkok pilates operator largest in thailand invited him to manger her studio empire great terms , refused her he stayed and watched thais explain to thais in thai pilates moves and that they still could not understand till they were physically showed and demostarted the move. why use the language he asked me , i said habit and nothing else they know

[Markaew]

They can't give directions because they cannot orientate themselves...so they just follow landmarks....

...just like women do..

Hmmm...I thought men navigate by landmarks.

[RobertHima]

Very interesting topic, totally agree. Maps do not work, even in Thai, it doesn't matter. When I did my one-year extension, they said there is no map in the huge pile of documents. I showed them the printed map from Google Maps, perfect to find our house. They said it's not good, the officer who will check the house will not find by this, I have to draw a map by hand. The standard kiddie map, with landmarks.

[Markaew]

After being given erroneous directions 100% of the time by Thais, I gave up on them a long time ago.

At first, I thought it was a "screw a farang" thing, but I later realized it was it happen to every one.

Edited July 1, 2013 by Markaew

[MilesCh]

A few weeks ago I was trying to reach a place after dark close to a McDonalds which had an icon on the map. I thought I was just a couple of kilometers away and asking directions several times finally brought me to another city 30kl distant. There I found a police station and a plainclothes officer who didn't have a clue. However his wife did and had me follow her for a few km weaving around town and then she stopped and said go left here for 30kl and you'll find it. And she was right. Evidently everyone knows the McDonalds icon regardless of where it's situated on a map!

[Globeman]

This topic amuses me because it is so true. It really surprised me when I showed a tuk-tuk driver a map written in Thai, and I knew exactly where I wanted to go, but didn't want to walk. The driver didn't have a clue how to read a simple map, even when written in Thai. Eventually I just had to tell him somewhere that I knew was close to where I wanted to go and I just walked from there.

I've drawn a simple map to show Thai friends where I live and they didn't understand. Obviously, rural Thais are not taught about maps in school and when they move to the city they still don't understand. That does not mean they are dumb. They just haven't learned the concept. It is like a farang raised in a city being put in the wilderness and expecting them to survive.

I think it is easy to underestimate the impact of having maps high on the education curriculum on conceptualizing a sense of location. In the West, we have maps laid on us from a very early age, and from the perspective of understanding where we are relative to everything else in the world. Thais don't.

Thais can draw the outline of Thailand with surprising accuracy because it is the only map they are exposed to - after all, what other map matters? (ask a regular Thai person to find Thailand on a world map... if they can do that, ask them where Switzerland is. Keeps you entertained for hours. Maybe this is why so many are afraid to leave the country; aside from starving to death because other countries don't have edible food, they may fear that they won't be able to find their way back from the "far-away place".

But with directions, my favourite, yet most maddening recurring event is when my wife is navigating (which she can be pretty good at if she has been somewhere before), and we come to a split in the road. "Left or right, sweetie?" "Yes."

It seems to me that Thais FEEL their way towards their destination (and maybe through their entire lives), as the landscape (and its previously noted landmarks) unfurls before them. Farangs try to conceive of the whole journey at once.

[cbluck58]

Earlier this year I drove from Songkhla to Nakhon Phanom - I have a GPS but didn't use it - I find them distracting - and didn't listen to my wife's directions at all because by the time she would have got to the info I needed , we would have passed the road I wanted. This is not because she is stupid or superficial , it is just the way Thai people explain things.

The answer to road navigation in Thailand is planning - I printed out the entire route from Google maps , memorised the road numbers and we got there and back with only one wrong turn in Bangkok on the return journey.

Moral - if you want it done right , do it yourself as there is no help out there that is of any usewhen it comes down to getting from A to B - even the road numbers seem to disappear and change at will on some routes......

[neek]

As has been noted, Thais navigate differently. Most Western men navigate by direction. Most Thais (and many Western women) navigate by landmark.

Have a look at the "maps" that accompany most Thai advertising, including brochures. These "maps" resemble a transport diagram more than they resemble a map: The scale is off and directions are arbitrary. All streets and roads go perfectly north and south or east and west. But, these diagrams do work with navigation by landmark because they show the absolute relationship between objects, even thought the distances and direction are way off.

Thais have been doing this forever. Look at an ancient Thai navigation chart and everything is in a straight line; as if you could sail from Bangkok to Taiwan without ever having to turn.

This is a very good point. As an example of how different cultures do things different ways, I find most maps provided by events or stores in Bangkok infuriating and misleading, a recent example being the one for Impact Arena. North is rarely 'up', roads are portrayed at unrealistic and misleading angles, scales, widths, etc. Symbology seems confusing (bridges over rivers and so on).

However, give that same map to my Thai wife and she makes perfect sense of it and guides us to the right place first time.

The abstract nature of many Thai maps reminds me of the simplified view of the London Underground, where route lines on the official map are not realistic in their positioning or alignment. In general, I don't approve of this approach for above-ground maps, as they simplify and reduce information that might be useful, but it is what the average Thai seems used to and they deal pretty well with it. It may be worth adding that many parts of the Thai road system seems to have been poorly planned, with arcane junctions, flyovers, back roads and so on, such that a realistic map might be more of a hinderance than a help.

[1020]

Maps? Farang think too much. Just look around gormlessly, eat some food, and repeat until the destination is found. Then look surprised.

[cooked]

Be happy that your wife doesn't very gracefully and airily wave so that you don't know whether that's a left or a right coming up.

[Bagwan]

Silly me once decided to get a marriage visa rather than the retirement one. I had to provide a map showing the location of my house. I provide three, one large scale, one medium scale and the last to cover the last 200 yards. I drew them on foolscap paper with colours to show the difference betwee sai and soi. My wife wrote the names in Thai and we provided house numbers. I was just taking the pi$$. The maps were shown all round the Jomtien office and I wondered if I was to be the cause of raising the standard of maps required by Immigration. I couldn't help saying that where I come from if you need directions, you asked a policeman.

On another occasion I was unsure of my exact location in BKK. My wife and I enlsited the help of a police sergeant sitting in his box picking his nose or whatever policeman do when out of the public gaze. I opened my map andmy wife explained that wewould bepleased if he would indicate our location and we would take it from there. He took the map and immediately turned it upside down. We thanked him profusely and left.

[islandguy]

Fun thread, have felt/noticed a lot of the stuff commented on here. Here are a few thoughts that have occurred to me about this topic while living here:

Thai highway signs don't have North/South/East/West. They refer to the large city in that direction -Bangkok/Chiang Mai or Bangkok/Chumpon

When I moved to Hawaii, I soon learned that on an island, you need to use referential directions. If you drive North on a road, at some point you will always be curving around so that you will no longer be going North. Locals and acclimated newcomers always use a reference that could usually be changed into clockwise/counterclockwise but instead uses a reference point based on where you start from or where you will need to turn (so going in the direction of Ewa from the airport is clockwise but going Ewa from Waiana'ae is counterclockwise)). The references stay fixed (if it is not a cassave field), you are the moving point.

Some interesting recent research shows that languages strongly influence our relationship with directions. In some languages you would say I walked North into the living room. People in those language groups are always going to know where North is - and the converse would seem to be true. See from page two:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?pagewanted=3

Traveling years ago in South America, with good language skills, I learned to always ask 3 different people for any directions I needed. If I didn't get at least two answers that were the same, I would start over. It's not only Thai people who don't want to look ignorant.

The phrase, 'should we turn left or right' followed by the answer 'yes', is hilariously familiar!

[winstonc]

Reading through this thread it's like listening to some old ladies nattering over the fence about what's wrong with everyone else in the neighborhood in order to make their pathetic lives seem somehow superior. Of course to some extent that applies to many threads on TV.

I wonder why most farang, no matter how long they live here, can't read a sentence in Thai that any Thai child could?

Even more telling, why are ALL farang fat alcoholics? I know these things are true because if I put my blinkers on and walk along the bars west of 2nd Rd in Pattaya at 10:00 in the morning, all the farangs I see are fat alcoholics who can't read any Thai and therefore it must be true of ALL farangs. Golly now I really feel so much better about myself.

And that would make you the "curtain twitcher " then ... not liking what you hear , but listening all the same !

here here,,but hey he knows everything,,,,,,,,,,,

[johnstew]

Not relevant to the Thai situation - but pointing out cultural differences: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

[arthurwait]

Maps? Farang think too much. Just look around gormlessly, eat some food, and repeat until the destination is found. Then look surprised.

And then drive around the car park for 30 minutes to try to avoid a 2 minute walk from the empty spaces to destination.

[asupeartea]

I agree with the comment about landmarks. Thais don't learn maps and many can't connect the graphic representation with the real world --

they just can't make the abstract leap from a 90 degree corner on a piece of paper to the real world. Many times I have people scan the map for the name of my destination and then my current location, then say you go from here to there dragging their finger along the map connecting the dots. If they've actually been from here to there, they'll give a long explanation. I find Google Maps has flaws but I can usually get lost and unlost 3 times in less time than it takes one person to give me bad directions.

[jbrain]

My experience is that most Thais don't have a clue where they are actually living. I have had times that I was searching for a certain shop, and asked other business people in the area if they knew about it, with in most cases negative answers. Turned out sometimes that the shop was only 2 buildings away.

[boowahday]

How the world looks to a New Yorker

[user786895]

Showing a map (that is probably printed in English) to a Thai and concluding that Thais don't know how to read maps is unfair. If you were given a map printed in Thai, I would be sure you would also be at a loss trying to figure out where things are located. Map are not something locals would be needing so there is no need for them to use one. Don't be to quick in putting blame on the locals.

I turned up for Thai langauage class one morning and my teacher was sweeping outside and looking with some amusement at two tourists on a motorbike showing a Thai woman a map. "Two things you should know Nick, Thai people don't know how to use maps, and the other thing is they won't tell you that they don't know!" Hold on second here Teacher, I have seen Boy Scouts and Girlguides on many occasions out for walks on this island. "Ah, yes Nick. They do understand 'follow the leader' though!"

I didn't; it was my Thai teacher, who is Thai, telling me about Thais.

[Potter]

This is weird. I have the exact opposite experience. If I explain somebody to come to my house in Thai, they can 100% find it. If I explain somebody in English language to where my house is. There is a 50% chance they can find it. Also I have been here long enough, so that if I happen to talk English, it is usually with a strong Thai dialect. One factor to consider, might be the education level in between of the people who are communicating.

[hotrod4098]

when i ask she says can not ask any body...then it comes out...if they not no they loose face..then they angry with me..spent

2 hours in bangkok just walking around as she would not ask..then i lost it..then she told me

[masuk]

Same in Indonesia. Give someone a map to check where we are, and they'd twist and turn it, not knowing which way was up.

Often, I'd be told to keep on going as I was heading in the right direction - which was a total pack of b..shit as invariably it would be wrong.

[CMKiwi]

Ive been asked for directions quite a few tmes and in many different countries but perhaps the funniest time was in the Philippines when a local (Obviously from out of town) asked me "Is this the third turn on the left?"

Now any answer would be correct I replied no....you need to go back one. I laughed to myself all the way home.

[joboss]

When asking or giving directions to a Thai person I find one good rule is to look closely at their eyes -- in most cases the light's on but there's no-one home.....

Really?? I guess you would not believe them anyway.. Get a GPS and keep the windows up.

[joboss]

Silly me once decided to get a marriage visa rather than the retirement one. I had to provide a map showing the location of my house. I provide three, one large scale, one medium scale and the last to cover the last 200 yards. I drew them on foolscap paper with colours to show the difference betwee sai and soi. My wife wrote the names in Thai and we provided house numbers. I was just taking the pi$$. The maps were shown all round the Jomtien office and I wondered if I was to be the cause of raising the standard of maps required by Immigration. I couldn't help saying that where I come from if you need directions, you asked a policeman.

On another occasion I was unsure of my exact location in BKK. My wife and I enlsited the help of a police sergeant sitting in his box picking his nose or whatever policeman do when out of the public gaze. I opened my map andmy wife explained that wewould bepleased if he would indicate our location and we would take it from there. He took the map and immediately turned it upside down. We thanked him profusely and left.

haha he turned it upside down to look for the 2 x 100 bt notes

[masuk]

is there such a thing as a hand-held sat-nav? I don't need a smart phone.

[chinostar]

They can't give directions because they cannot orientate themselves...so they just follow landmarks....

...just like women do..

Sexist remark. I guess this forum is only for men? Never read a reaction by women...

[chinostar]

What do you expect if the majority follows Thaksin's example? Thais in general don't really listen, unless it's their own voice.