PLEASE don’t COMPLAIN about my THAI at a TOURISM HOTSPOT
I wonder if there was a time in which a similar sign was written in Latin.
Why do you presume this is about Americans?
American tourists are much less common in Thailand than English or Australians.
Man, that bugs me how many Americans are out there giving the rest of us a bad name. I don’t travel, but if I did, I’d be grateful a non-native English speaker knew any English at all. And not learning enough of their language to at least get you by for the trip just sounds like poor planning in general. Some people are just incapable of looking before they leap, and for some reason a bunch of those people travel.
You guys still seem to miss the point of the message, it checks out you’re kinda dumb and it’s not surprised your manners are shit, cause you only care about yourselves and pretend that everyone at earth have to serve you
I think you should go take a nice walk. Could do wonders for you
I’ve been to a few other countries. The people (especially retail workers) are extremely patient. All it takes is a smile and “excuse me” and they will try as hard as they can to build a communication bridge. I don’t know why we Americans have no patience
Even if you speak Thai, complaining about someone’s foreign language abilities as a foreigner is rude.
To be fair. Learning english is a must nowadays. The closest we have to an universal language.
And I say it as a non-native English speaker.
As a developer in a non English speaking country, in the last decade having English in your resume has moved from nice-to-have to mandatory, now the nice to have is having a third one.
A third what?
Eye. Clairvoyance really helps with bug testing.
Language
One random thought I had about this the other day was that I feel sort of bad for the British, Irish, Americans and Australians. Well, the monolingual ones.
Anytime they go abroad, it’s like “oh they didn’t even bother to learn the language”, but then when we who didn’t grow up on English do, we’ve already learned at least English, so not knowing the local language is somehow more understandable. Or perhaps people don’t feel that way, but it’s just a thought I had. Like it feels less polite when a native English speaker just addresses someone in English in a foreign country, but if a non-English speaker asks “do you speak English” with broken English, it’s much more… sympathetic.
I’m just babling nevermind me.
I do agree with you though and can’t really understand people in my country who still say they can’t speak English. I mean, people who still use the internet and consume media that’s in English. I don’t get it. Language acquisition gets worse sure, but it’s never gone away from me at least. I watch one season of some show in a language I don’t understand and I already start picking up the very basics. Nothing I could use, surely, but like my brain is clearly structuring and trying to make sense of the language, so with enough exposition to a language…
The Irish are increasingly bilingual it’s just that they’re learning their own language, not anyone else’s
I know, and I’m sorry for not putting up a further disclaimer, but the English have destroyed so many cultures and languages that listing them all would’ve just taken up too much space.
Gabh mo leiscéal, I have the utmost respect for the Irish.
I watch one season of some show in a language I don’t understand
I wish my brain worked that way; I’d be watching Finnish television and movies all day, every day.
I watch a fair number of shows in Swedish or Norwegian, and I’ve never picked up anything from what they’re saying. I always have to have subtitles.
I have to admit that this doesn’t work nearly as well when I’m watching anything Asian. I mean I’ve got a tiny tiny tiny understanding of the things Japanese people put at the end of words and I can now hear those a little after watching the samurai show that came out what was it. Absolutely amazing.
Uh… “Shōgun”, yeah.
Anyway, it works much better for PIE-languages, and obviously the easiest ones are Nordic/Germanic, seeing as they’re coursing languages to English and I know Swedish.
I think having a native non-PIE language really helped, as once I learned English properly (and had some Swedish) the others just started making sense more or less. Eastern European languages are harder, but I haven’t watched any shows in Polish yet…
Finnish must be a fucking nightmare, seeing how many grammatical cases we have and those are applied to all words in a sentence basically. So just modifying the verb will mean that you probably have to conjugate every other word differently.
Like one simple example “I want a car” “haluan auton” but do you want your car (you not thee, so plural second person) would be “haluatteko autonne” but if you want to say “would you like to have your car” it’s “haluaisitteko autonne”, and in the singular second person it’s “haluatko auton”, but also in informal Finnish you can sometimes drop the conjugations and indeed using them might seem too formal, and also you’d use some sort of dialect so in reality second person singular informal would be “haluaks auton”, but you can also put in the word for you “sinä”, (which informally is mostly “sä”) and its the same thing “haluaks sä auton”, but if you change it to “haluaks sun auton” it becomes “do you want your car”.
Whops rant. I’ve had a glög. My point being Finnish must be crazy hard to learn. I’d need to learn an Asian language to get into that whole market of languages better.
I’ve always been into languages though, and didn’t even need to be taught to read, as I picked it up myself from newspapers, as I was annoyed my older brother had a skill I did not.
When I watched the latest season of Babylon Berlin, I dreamt in German for a few times. And I do not speak it enough to have a conversation. Enough to order in a restaurant, sure, but not enough to chat like in my dreams.
I understand the chorus from that song, and some of the Lyrics. I just wish I was in a position to go live abroad for a few years, I’d like to see how fast I become fluent in some of these European languages I’m somewhat primed for. Plus they legalised weed in Germany, so that’s another good reason as well.
I feel like I’d struggle learning Hindi like that
Finnish must be a fucking nightmare
It is. I’m Estonian, it’s the closest related language to Finnish, and I’ve found nearly any other language easier to pick up on than Finnish.
Apparently on average, it’s easier for Estonians to Understand Finnish than it is for Finns to understand Estonian.
One of those asymmetric mutual intelligibility things. Interesting video, that.
It’s been years since I had glög; I should make that again since it’s starting to get chilly.
Unfortunately, part of living in the US is that most people aren’t exposed to other languages to any significant degree. If you are a native American English speaker, and grow up in a large city, you might hear enough Spanish to learn it, but that’s about it. I learned Spanish in school, but there was no opportunity to practice until I moved to a large city close to the Mexican border.
I personally don’t think it’s a bad thing that the world is moving closer to having a universal language, and resisting a clear and obvious trend that serves an obvious public good is simply being obstinate and anti American just for the sake of being anti American.
If there’s ever a universal language, why should it be English? Why not Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese? Those are also language spoken by many people. Is it because many (though not all) Americans can’t be bothered to learn about other languages and cultures? If anything, it should be a conlang, such that it benefits no one. Or at least no one is currently raised on it. I for one would vote Interlingua, seeing as it is supposedly easier for and based off European languages like Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, but also English, German, and Russian (or so I hear)
Edit: let us not also forget of the cultural aspects of languages currently existing
That whole clear and obvious trend I mentioned is a good place to start, but as far as the language nobody currently speaks the last thing you want to say when trying to get everyone to adopt something is that it won’t benefit anyone.
As far as Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, etc. yes those could be a good option but they are simply not the best option.
English started becoming the lingua franca before American cultural dominance even. It happened because of British naval superiority and dominance over trade
I live in the Netherlands, where it’s not the Americans assuming everyone speaks English. Sometimes it’s quite bizarre too: we have this deaf, Ukrainian colleague who doesn’t speak but communicates with Russian Sign Language (and whatever gestures you can think up on the spot), and it’s very blatant that he doesn’t speak English because he doesn’t speak and can’t hear, and has never written any notes in English or anything like that, but I’ve still caught other colleagues mouthing, or sometimes outright saying, things to him in English, as if it’d help. I remember once coming across a mute man who obviously understood Dutch, who then tried to ask someone a question, who then replied in a very “my husband is antiquair” kind of way. Otherwise it’s mostly European tourists and immigrants who assume you speak English.
I’m a native speaker of German and of course I spoke English to the people in the Netherlands when I was there. I don’t know any Dutch and don’t expect them to speak German, so English is pragmatically the language that we have most likely in common.
Hop on a 6 hour flight, or drive for 40 hours from most countries and you’ll likely find yourself in a place that speaks an entirely different language. In America all that gets you is someone who has a different kind of twang in their voice.
Not saying it’s right to make that assumption but it’s definitely understandable why people do.
BECAUSE ENGLISH ALWAYS WORKS IF YOU CAN SPEAK IT LOUD ENOUGH
Are there still people that use an accent of the country that they are in but using English words expecting the native person to understand them?
That vaguely works in Japan, because they have a ton of English loanwords, and a lot of them wouldn’t be understood by a monolingual Japanese speaker unless you say them in a Japanese accent (it’s a bit more complicated than that but that’s the gist).
Why are people from the USA always called Americans?
Because calling anyone else an American is insulting.
Just what people commonly understand so people say it. I always read it in a disapproving Russian accent because of too much TV, the americans
Because they’re the only country with America in their name whereas United States is shared by Mexico
Also in English there’s a distinction between North and South America, with the supercontinent being referred to as “The Americas”, so America isn’t really ambiguous, they’re also geologically and environmentally distinct enough that “The Americas” isn’t used so much and “New World” is often more relevant to include Australia as another somewhat culturally similar sparsely populated former colonial area.
So is someone from Brazil an “American”? Surprisingly yes, and straight to jail.
In Portuguese (as spoken in Portugal, Brazil, USA, Japan, Ghana, wherever) they’re an americano/a but in English (as spoken in USA, UK, Brazil, Portugal, Nepal, wherever) they’re South American but not American because it’s a linguistic difference rather than a geographical/cultural one
Same reason why people from the United Kingdom are called ‘British’, despite Northern Ireland not being in Britain.
There just aren’t better proper adjectives for these 2 countries.
While you can say ‘North American’ to mean anyone from North America and not specifically the US, I’m not sure there’s a fitting word that refers to anyone from North or South America. Although, at that point, the group of people you are talking about is perhaps too broad to be useful in most cases.
Same reason why people from the United Kingdom are called ‘British’, despite Northern Ireland not being in Britain.
Ireland is part of the British Isles, so you could even call people from the Republic of Ireland british (and then run away really fast).
I recommend not doing this 😂 I prefer to call the British isles “the European archipelago” :)
TEA
And saying North America includes Canada, and I think out of respect to the Canadians they don’t wanna be lumped together with us
Why does someone always smugly point this out in these threads?
Because there’s always got to be some young “boo America” edgelord contrarian that thinks they’re really doing something by saying it. But really they are just an idiot in a long line of idiots who isn’t saying anything at all.
US Americans are seen by basically everyone as the most obnoxious tourists on this planet. Their self importance and undeserved national pride is second to none and it shows in every thread like this. Its just fun to see them get defensive when anyone points it out.
This is literally what that sign is about and its odd that you are confused that people would point this out.
Why are you assuming the sign is about Americans? There’s no reference to the US anywhere except OP’s title
Speaking of obnoxious self importance
No youuu 😭
Is all i get from that.
USAmerican, USAian, USAn, lUSA?
USAmerican is my go to yep.
Are you joking though? I’ve never heard this phrase uttered out loud except by that one miss America contestant who was derided for being stupid.
Found the lUSA
Judging by their instance they’re german where “US-Amerikaner” is a pretty common term, never heard it used in english though.
Unitedstatians. Thats how we call them here (estadounidense)
Would you prefer “yanks”?
Because gunpowder.
Gunpowder go in metal tube.
Projectile go in meral tube.
Ignite.
BOOM.
Death.
Human go new place.
Bring Boomsticks.
Native humans = Dead
Native humans = Surrender
World = Dominated
Language = Spread
Language = Become default
The End
Sadly Ever After
(Fun fact most pilots have to learn Aviation English in order to operate internationally. You can thank the gunpowder for that.
Accurate af
The End
Would have been really funny if you said
Thai End
there
I always hope that everyone speaks English and if they seem worried about how it sounds I remind them that their English is way better than my their language which usually breaks the ice.
Yeah I hung out with a bunch of Germans who were really good English speakers but constantly were self critical of their English skills. They were beating my German skills by a landslide even at their worst moments.
Heard someone say this on reddit many years ago after someone was being a wise ass about their English which was obviously second or third language
You speak English because it’s the only language you know; I speak English because it’s the only language you know
That’s pretty funny, but I’m years past accepting the “hurr durr ignorant american knows only one language” thing. Except as a response to someone harassing someone about their English capabilities, as seems to be the case in your example. 😁
The way I figure it, if the people two states away from me in every direction spoke a different language from me, and from each other, I’d probably be multilingual, too. (As would most of us)
Is this not fairly likely in the US with Mexican Spanish or/and Canadian/Cajun French?
Within the USA, the language enclaves aren’t strong enough. You might find people who can’t speak English, but there are enough people in their communities that can speak English that you can get along.
Of the countries I’ve visited so far, I find that Mexico has the strongest language barrier as Mexico is large enough to maintain an internal standard of Mexican Spanish. Outside of the northern border states, you can drive two states away in Mexico and still have people speak Spanish.
No, because these people are also highly likely to also know English and the vast, vast majority of people in any given location speak English as a default in public. Unless another language is being commonly spoken in public, it isn’t even close to having entire states speak a different language.
Not whole states, but Miami gets close.
I’m sure there are people who go to Mexico/Canada as often as Europeans seem to be popping into other countries, but most of us very rarely do.
But most of us do have to visit other states often, which works out to a similar radius as hopping countries in Europe in many cases, that’s why I made the comparison I did.
I can restrict my bullying to those living near the Mexican border and the English
Most people I’ve talked to who know English as a second language speak and read and understand it better than most American’s I’ve spoken to who know only English.
Besides people speaking bad English to you are braver and more engaging than the average person in general. Id speak bad English with just about anyone before talking to most of my family lol.
Thanks for the examples
Implying the sign isn’t talking about Australians who visit in the same numbers
But America dumbo!
And perhaps Brits and Canadians. I’m not sure about their visit numbers though.
Wait, in that case maybe complaining is a bit justified? Different of course of it’s a place off the beaten path, but if it’s a hotbed of English-speaking tourists then having staff that speak their language seems pretty important.
Guess it’s really hard to say without more context (story of the internet).
Or anybody in europe who probably speaks english as thats the “world language”
Unless they’re from a primarily English speaking country, they’d be unlikely to complain though.
Yeah they wouldnt complain… except if theyre my grandfather who started complaining in vietnam to a hotel receptionist that they dont speak hungarian, a language about 14 million people speak in the world and the only language it has mutual intelligibility with is spoken by about 10000 people…
I’ve met lots of people who seem to hold the sentiment that if THEY managed to learn English, why can’t EVERYONE ELSE?
Sounds like they have something to compensate for. ┐( ∵ )┌
