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how many can speak thai!!


belfastish

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You lot are hard enough to understand speaking english.....fuck knows how you expect a Thai to understand you speaking their language with an Irish accent. That's the beauty about being an aussie......we don't have an accent. :neener:

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Learn all three together: vowel sound, consonant sound, tone. Only way to do it. If you get used to saying a word with the wrong tone, you'll find it hard as hell to correct. :(

 

p.s. Reading Thai helps a lot. When I started reading, I quickly found that my Thai teachers were letting me get away with some pretty bad pronunciation.

 

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Rule #1. Don't learn Thai in bars or from BGs. Not unless you only plan to speak Thai in bars and to BGs.

 

:(

 

 

 

agree, this is the most important rule, don't learn the bar slang! If you can speak rather good and respectable Thai this opens a lot of doors to a Farang.

:tophat:

 

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I don't think there's so much a specific "bar slang" (other than the openness with which the girls talk about sexual acts, etc., which would be inapopriate in many other thai social circles) as there is this situation in the bars, among the girls, etc.: they are low-educated (I would estimate average of 4-5 years education) working-class speakers of Thai.

 

you generally do not want to learn a highly literate, sophisticated language with multiple levels and centuries of history from low-educated working class speakers. would you want to learn english from auto mechanics in New Jersey, or dock workers in London?

 

though keep in mind that bar girls can speak very polite "proper" thai when they want to/need to, maybe moreso than the english comparisons above, due to the highly stratified class nature of thai society and the level of brainwashing of the people by the government to make them good little robots.

 

another big caveat is this: do NOT try to imitate the way that bar girls speak to each other.

 

mind you, this isn't just a bar-related issue; you also wouldn't want to--as a farang outsider in this land--imitate the way motorcycle taxi drivers, food vendors, or for that matter high school students talk to their friends. if you do, you'll pick up many terms "ku," "meung," "ay hia," "daek khao," "woey," "tiin," etc., which are perfectly fine for intimate THAI friends to use in casual conversation with each other but which are NEVER appropriate for farangs to use.

 

if you try to ape such intimate/casual language in your conversations with thais, they will most often not accept it, no matter how appropriate it might be for a similar social situation where the conversants are both thai.

 

so I think the main intention of the remarks in this thread about "bar slang" was really to warn people not to try to imitate this kind of intimate, casual speech between the girls (they generally wouldn't use it directly with you unless they are extremely comfortable/close with you or quite sure you spoke no thai and trying to mock/insult you)

 

preahko

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My sincere apologies for hijacking the thread and its only for one thing but other than living in a country and being fully immersed as well as classroom instruction, what is the best tape or cd out there for me to learn spanish?

 

I want to learn Thai as well and will make use of that link that was provided. Thanks.

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