Language and Linguistics
When asking foreigners that have been in Thailand for any reasonable amount of time “How’s your Thai?”, I often hear the answer “Oh, I speaka bit of Taxi Thai and that’s about it”. Striking up a conversation with ataxi driver is a great way to build up fluency
Thai
Swee Sar Pok Wee’ Flai Lai – What’s in an accent? My grandfather used to tell me “When you’re learning a language, you want to try your best to avoid having speakers of that language complimenting you. If people are complimenting you on how well you’re speaking ‘their’
During my school days, there were two things I feared more than anything. The first was receiving my report cards and the second was the parent teacher evenings that normally followed shortly after. No matter how well I did in other areas, there would never fail to be a comment
Culture and Business
In October 2004, I was standing chatting with a group of Thai business owners at an Australian Chamber of Commerce networking evening at a five-star hotel here in Bangkok. As I turned to order another drink from the bar, a Dutch gentleman briskly extended his hand in my direction, teeth
We’re getting close to that end-of-year season where “buy before you think” is the name of the game as we run the gauntlet with our credit cards to see who will run out of steam first. It wasn’t that long ago in Thailand when credit cards weren’t
Ok – if you look at the date of the last (first) post and now, quite a bit of time has transpired. In the next couple of days I’ll be uploading a bunch of posts that I’ve meant to do for a long time now. Happy reading! The original
In February 2006, I went to an Amcham evening held at a hotel here in Bangkok. The topic – BLOGS. It was presented by Derek Brown from Microsoft here in Thailand. As the night went on, we were taken through blog galaxies out there on the internet. Apparently, the gods are