ศาลาชุมนุม

[claude06thailand]

รถไหล ! > the car is moving back or forward ! you can say or hear that if you stop on a slope and forget to apply the brakes

[bifftastic]

Thanks Claude, I'll try and remember that! Usually I revert to some quite colourful English phrases when that kind of thing happens!

[claude06thailand]

Thanks Claude, I'll try and remember that! Usually I revert to some quite colourful English phrases when that kind of thing happens!

I am French, but we have some nice phrases too...

[r2d2]

I am French, but we have some nice phrases too...

Love it!

train (fr.) treno (it.) Zug (de.) trahere ? (lat.)

I exchanged most recently a bulb in the studio of my wife (ดาหลา.de). I told her: "'Die Birne (poire), die Lampe (lampe) is ready!": She replied: "You should say lot fai in Thai." I replied to her: "No, I will not call a Birne (pirum/pero/poire/pear/สาลี่) a rot fai [here it is about a rot lai] a train!"

Found out, now, while reading your lovely comment, para-logically that

bulb translates into หลอดไฟ, lot fai .... shame on me

[claude06thailand]

หลอดไฟ > รถไฟ
without context, I could mix them !

[pensive]

Err, what about the tone?

And (though doesn't mean much to me) the two vowels are different.

I thought that was why r2d2 was embarrassed.

[Tgeezer]

Err, what about the tone?

And (though doesn't mean much to me) the two vowels are different.

I thought that was why r2d2 was embarrassed.

You are a man after my own heart.
I have a friend who actually does pronounce รถ completely differently from หลอด; tone, vowel, consonant, duration, the whole lot. Some Teachers don't want us to sound uneducated since it reflects badly on them.

[r2d2]

Err, what about the tone?

I thought you know the tone rules?!

But I agree with Claude: "Without context..." Tone of an individuum is also a context.

But I know my wife, thus, the context ... and was making a joke - of course I heard the difference (and tried to immitate the sound of หลอด (and just understood that the meaning was different from train/car ... as I put a new bulb, not a new car, into the ... electric candle stick) but still did not know how to write the term ... until yesterday.

[r2d2]

I am French, but we have some nice phrases too...

Claude, forgot to mention this, sorry, but it fits so well:

Last March my wife and my sister-in-law visited Paris. Since then she wants to learn French! She loves the French sound of language very much!

(((Backgrounds: We have been together in London where she loves St. James Park, tulips; and Amsterdam (btw no tulips in Amsterdam). On a sight seeing tour she laughed very much about the, with fun, exaggeratedly pronounced /ch/ in Grachten, but, and that impressed me most, told that she understands very well written Dutch being, from her point of view, in-between the 2 foreign languages she knows, English and German.)))

At the beginning I was ... sceptic. French Actually? In real live she has not found time to study French, but a question, in spite:

My "teutonic-biased" view on a Thai wanting to learn French is like this:

Bordeaux ... I would argue, as a (putative French 'ignorant') German, that -eaux is the sequence of a vowel (e), a diphthong (ao), and a final consonant cluster (ks). But I know French enough to know that "eaux" represents a specific /o/***, with the help of Thai, บอร์โด, thus, 1 of 2 different long /o/s?
I do not know French enough for ... so this question here:

Is the French vowel system too complex for Thai? And, what are your experiences with Thai learning French?

(((My experience with that is that German u-umlaut is not simply Thai ue, and o-umlaut is not simply Thai oe etc. but otherwise found that there is a lot of congruence as regard to the vowel system, and German consonants, final consonant clusters , let's speak about French - more beautiful...)))

*** ""eaux" represents a specific /o/" Btw. the o is one of the few letters really still missing in eaux, written

[claude06thailand]

Hello r2d2 ! Hope you are fine and wish you a Happy New Year visiting many countries with you Thai wife who loves French and probably will love Italian too, which is for me the most melodious language.
When I was about 20, I had an opportunity to learn some dutch and practice the "ch". I found it easy with english and german.

> Bordeaux ... บอร์โด seems a correct transcription.

I do not think that the French vowel system is too complex for Thai, since the sound of double or triple vowels is phonetically simple : eau = Ô
U is the probably the only difficult vowel for Thai people.

French is difficult to write correctly but the prononciation is not so important and most French do not differentiate a / â > é / è / ê > ai / ais > o / ô / eau

The few Thai people I know who speak French have more difficulty with the consonants F / G / V / R.