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French and Thailand


drogon

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Greetings all

 

I would like to know if you eve met a french speaking thai?

 

I am a native french speker myself and in my previous travels to LOS I never found a local speaking french.

 

Thanks for your answers

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All of the major Thai universities have French language programmes, and the Alliance Francaise is quite popular with Bangkok students.

 

But French is not studied nearly as much as in the past, since the languages offering the best chances for jobs nowadays are English, Mandarin and Japanese. Still, French is by no means a rare language amongst EDUCATED Thais. You can use French at the 5 star hotels.

 

The Catholic secondary schools may well offer French and sometimes German. However, very few government secondary schools will offer anything except English outside of Bangkok.

 

p.s. My wife studied French as her minor when she was an undergraduate, but has now forgotten how to speak it. She is like me ... we can read French, but have forgotten the spoken language through disuse.

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Yes.

 

But only one.

 

and this was about 5 years ago in Koh Samuii, and married to a French man from Brittany (or should that be a Breton from France?)

 

From past experiance I don't recall having met a lot of French guys in Thailand, which may explain things in the P4P scene.

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From past experiance I don't recall having met a lot of French guys in Thailand, which may explain things in the P4P scene.

--------------------------------

You're lucky. At least in Pattaya, there are plenty of "beurs" (that's french kids born of north african emigrants), and they can be pretty loud, over-bearing as a clan, and exploitative of the girls (ie. not paying, and treating them as shit, not all I'd venture, for fairness sake), all of this, always as a group. They're easy to spot, they never wear a shirt and are dyed blonde.

 

[unnecessary comments removed - KS]

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On my first trip upcountry to Mukdahan, the GF's father had served with the French foreign leigon in the Indo China wars and spoke french. I remember sitting cross legged on a 4' square piece of linoelium, under a 3' flourescent light surounded by all the insects in the entire province, smoking an enormous joint rolled in a piece of newspaper and speaking schoolboy French, how bizarre can you get?

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I made the mistake of speaking a bit of French to an old fellow in Nongkai. He promptly replied in rapid fire French that was far better than mine! (Not saying much these days.) Turned out he was actually a Laotian from across the river and had gone to school when Laos was still part of French Indo-China.

 

Similar thing happened to a Dutch neighbour who worked at the UN. One day an older Indonesian addressed him in fluent Dutch. The fellow was old enough to have started school before Indonesian independence.

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pe7e said:

On my first trip upcountry to Mukdahan, the GF's father had served with the French foreign leigon in the Indo China wars and spoke french. I remember sitting cross legged on a 4' square piece of linoelium, under a 3' flourescent light surounded by all the insects in the entire province, smoking an enormous joint rolled in a piece of newspaper and speaking schoolboy French, how bizarre can you get?

 

This winter I was in Trang sitting on a pier spanning a river while watching the mudskippers doing their thing in the silt, when out of the blue a guy dressed in what ressembled a 18th century safari outfit complete with helmet and all appeared.

A total anachroism except from the 2 cameras dangling around his neck, which left little doubt about his origin. And sure enough, he was japanese, a researcher studying the local population of dygongs.

He spoke english well and during our conversation he at one point mentioned that he had studied in Frankfurt and that his german was better than his english, but rarely did he have the opportunity to practise it.

So there we sat in the south of thailand, a dane and a japanese speaking german :) Weird.

 

To get back to the subject, I have met a few thais who had at one point learnt french, but their french was at least as rusty as my schoolboy french acquired 20 years ago.

Never met a thai actually able to conduct a conversation in french, not surprisingly though, as I usually stay upcountry.

 

Cheers

Hua Nguu

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the old lady running the Dalat Indochine speaks excellent french (much better than me anyway); but i think she is from Vietnam.

have once heard a thai guide speaking quite well french to his tour group.

and then there was the mamasan of madame claude (former bar on soi 33) who spoke some french

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