Better late than never :P
 

Erm, belated "Hi".

Been posting for a couple of weeks - found the forum before I noticed the Welcome Inn :o

Anyhow, British expat in Thailand for several years - married to a Thai for 15+ years - two beautiful daughters (erm, and no ugly ones). Post on several Thai/Expat related sites (one of the original members of ThaiVisa for example - about 9 years worth! - not what it once was though). Have a fair knowledge of the country, people and visa rules, so always happy to help answer q's.

I home school my girls (11 and 13) - own a business (cafe) - and write computer games in between (actually the Mrs works the Cafe day-today, so mostly teaching and coding). In the UK I ran my own software house (working for blue chips on contractual basis) - so been my own boss most of my life. MSc in Info tech many moons ago. Taught in tech college for a year or so here when I first arrived (English/Tourism/Business - none of which were my subjects - though did take a TEFL course for the English).
Had a head on collision with the big four oh not so long ago :(

Can read Thai, but can't spell for toffee. Thais are slightly amazed when a farang (that's us foreign devils) utters a coherent Thai sentence, but they are gob smacked when you can read the Thai script menu and order. I did an advanced reading course here at the YMCA once a few years back, there were three classes running at the same time. Class 1: ( beginner Thai - spoken only) about 40 Europeans, Antipodeans and Americans - Class 2: (Intermediate spoke/beginner reading) about ten people half farang half other Asian - class 3 (my class - conversational Thai and advanced reading/writing) 6 of us, two Koreans, two Japanese, one Chinese and me. The teacher said she rarely has any westerners in her class!

That's about it. See you all about the forum :D

Re: Better late than never :P
 

Hi there and welcome. :)

I think the majority of us missed the welcome inn to be honest. :o

But we like it when people do post here. :thumbup:

Enjoy B.E. :)

Re: Better late than never :P
 

Hey Wolf... think I've already welcomed you in Thailand forum but very nice to have you on board. You're doing some really helpful and informative posts and much appreciated by all.

I learnt a bit of Thai too when I was living in Phuket. The written stuff used to do my brain in. I learnt the characters and could read it, but used to take about half an hour to figure out one or two words :D Once you got the hang of the fact that the vowels surround the consonants and not necessarily in the logical order :blink: Thai logic eh? But the curries are fab.

See you over in the Thailand section.....


P.S. For those on the forum living in far flung places elsewhere CM LoS = Chiang Mai, Land of Smiles

Re: Better late than never :P
 

Hey you cracked my code (CM loS :lol:). Thanks for the "Hi".

Yes there are some real oddities in Thai script. My favourite is this: ภรรยา (wife) - if we took the letters one at a time it would be (transliterated) P-R-R-Y-Ah - but pronounced 'phanraya' - the double 'r' (รร) in the syllable is pronounced 'an' or 'ah' (if another consonent is suffixed) - another is แหลก (crushed/broken up) by letter Air-H-L-G pronounced 'Laerk' - what??? Can be fun.

I read that originally the Thai text when introduced (by King Ramkhamhaeng, in 1283), it was pure alphabetic left to right, but the Khmer/Pali writing systems were too different and it never caught on - so it reverted back to the Pali way of vowels being at any compass point around the consonant (although always pronounced after) - it's not that hard to learn which goes where as their positions are fixed (they do not change position - each vowel has a set position). The other stinger is that consonents change their sound (in many cases) depending on whether they are initial of final in a syllable - which is why Thais can't generally say anything ending in 'L' or 'R' (they can do 'er' - as 'uer' or 'ah') as the Thai letters for 'L' (ล) and 'R' (ร) both become 'N' sounding at the end of the syllable. They also use spaces as full stops - so in a sentence there are no gaps between words.

In English we have 5 vowels and (I think) 23 phonems relating to how they are spoken - in Thai there are hundreds of vowels (they include compounds) and each is spoken exactly in most cases (some exceptions of course :P). There are 42 letters in the Thai alphabet (46 with 4 obsolete ones - 2 never used, 2 rarely used) all of them consonents. plus a handful of special tone marks and other symbols (some punctuation some special like 'repeat the syllable' and 'etc').

It is useful though - once you can read, you know the tone the word needs to be spoken with (it's in the rules - with a few exceptions that generally fit - because they are hard to say with the grammatical tone). Saves having to remember the tone for every word in the language (as long as you can spell - which I am dire at :o)

Re: Better late than never :P
 

Welcome wolf5370!

I hope you enjoy being part of our little virtual community, nice to have you on board :)

Re: Better late than never :P
 

Hello and a big welcome to BE.

Moderators deal with any problems that arise such as inappropriate posts, spammers etc, you will find their names at the bottom right hand side of each forum's index in bold font.

Please contact me if I can give you any further help.

Rosemary