Quiz: How Thai-american are you?

No_Strings

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You are 41% Thai-american!

You may hang out with plenty of Thai-american friends. If you are Thai-american, you live your life on or a little below the hyphen; you grew up around the culture, and may even know a few words (food, bad words, etc), but you grew up in America nonetheless


I have no Thai heritage, nor do I know anything significant about Thai culture. Any answers I got correct were purely from common sense or basic powers of deduction. :rolleyes::redface:
(Nor am I American in any way, FWIW)
 

Mandee

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I'm 31% Thai-American. Cool!! :)

I have a friend from Bangkok, Thailand named Dol Subsantikul. He is awesome. lol He was a foreign exchange student in my sophomore class and we sat next to each other in science class. We went to prom together that year... it was fun :)
 

B_NineInchCock_160IQ

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95%. Helps that I've lived there and speak a little of the language, though.

I think most of the most difficult questions were ones that required some knowledge of the Thai language, of which I have very little, so I think you're right.

That doesn't necessarily make someone Thai-American, of course. Just knowledgeable about different languages or cultures.
 

davidjh7

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34%. I actually tried to learn some of the Thai language before, out of respect for a Thai friend. Damn, that is one TOUGH language for an old white American like me! The whole language is not only very different from western culture in how words are structured, but it is one fo the "sung" languages---the correct tones are everything, and the same word has totally different meaning, depending on whether the tone goes up or down and on which syllable. I think it is one I could only do correctly if I practiced enough with a native speaker....
 
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112773

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That's crazy! I forgot I posted a link to my quiz here. :tongue:

The quiz is pretty simple if somebody knows a bit about Thai culture; I also kind of played on the stereotypes that are really common (like the portrait of the King and Queen hanging in a Thai person's house).

I'll reword the stuff at the end. Or should I keep it as is? I guess we've all had a little Thai in us at one point in our lives. :biggrin1:
 
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By the way, I am glad you guys were bored enough to try it out! I am actually blushing.. heh.

We did have a Thai exchange student when I was in high school, but he wasn't in my grade, and I didn't know him very well. I do remember that he spelled his name "Rugkiat" and pronounced it "Lah-kyet".

Thais do have an r similar to that of Spanish, but usually everybody just pronounces it like l, or they dropped it all together.

And NineInchCock, I'll try to tweak it up a bit. By the way, what happened to your photos? You were a cutie.
 

B_NineInchCock_160IQ

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The "r" sounds in Spanish and most east Asian languages aren't very similar at all, except that they are both unlike the American "r" sound, which is highly unusual in the context of international phonetics.

I don't know a lot about Thai, but in most East Asian languages /r/ and /l/ sounds both exist, even though often speakers of these languages will deny having one or the other. The reason for this is that they are typically allophones of the same phoneme, meaning that they are, in the minds of those who use these languages, the same sound. They sound different based on the phonetic context in which they appear (what sounds they are next to, where exactly in a word the sounds appear, etc), and using one sound instead of the other does not change the meaning of a word.

You can see the same phenomenon occur when speakers of English attempt to pronounce some Indian words with a "p" or "aspirated p" sound. We have both sounds in English: the "p" sound at the end of "stop" is usually non-aspirated, though the "p" sound at the beginning of the word "pill" usually is aspirated. We use the same letter for both sounds and think that both are the same sound, even though they are not. When we try to pronounce a Hindi word that uses a "p" sound there is a high probability that we will mispronounce it in a way that changes the word's meaning, even though it sounds the same to us.

In Korean, /l/ and /r/ are allophones of the same phoneme, and both sounds are glides that end up sounding pretty similar to each other. An interesting thing happens, though, when they pronounce foreign words. Sometimes they pronounce "r" sounds in foreign words with a trill that does sound like a Spanish "r", but they don't do this for words in their own language.
 
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112773

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The "r" sounds in Spanish and most east Asian languages aren't very similar at all, except that they are both unlike the American "r" sound, which is highly unusual in the context of international phonetics.

I don't know a lot about Thai, but in most East Asian languages /r/ and /l/ sounds both exist, even though often speakers of these languages will deny having one or the other. The reason for this is that they are typically allophones of the same phoneme, meaning that they are, in the minds of those who use these languages, the same sound. They sound different based on the phonetic context in which they appear (what sounds they are next to, where exactly in a word the sounds appear, etc), and using one sound instead of the other does not change the meaning of a word.

You can see the same phenomenon occur when speakers of English attempt to pronounce some Indian words with a "p" or "aspirated p" sound. We have both sounds in English: the "p" sound at the end of "stop" is usually non-aspirated, though the "p" sound at the beginning of the word "pill" usually is aspirated. We use the same letter for both sounds and think that both are the same sound, even though they are not. When we try to pronounce a Hindi word that uses a "p" sound there is a high probability that we will mispronounce it in a way that changes the word's meaning, even though it sounds the same to us.

In Korean, /l/ and /r/ are allophones of the same phoneme, and both sounds are glides that end up sounding pretty similar to each other. An interesting thing happens, though, when they pronounce foreign words. Sometimes they pronounce "r" sounds in foreign words with a trill that does sound like a Spanish "r", but they don't do this for words in their own language.

Thai language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Scroll down to consonants; the Thai letter ร (as in the word ruk) is listed as a trill.

People on Thai television will use the standard, trilled r. However, we all have our own way of talking outside of formal settings, as do Thais, and they tend to pronounce the words with the l, or it drops based on the location of the r in the word. However, they CAN make the distinction.

How this ended up to be... I am not sure. Possibly out of convenience, to speak faster. For example, if you say "khrap" with the trilled r, it is just faster to drop it and say "khup".
 
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112773

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In the Caribbean Spanish dialects (puertorriqueño, for example), the people tend to replace the r with l: mi amol. In Spanish Phonetics class we called this lamdacismo. I understand why it occurs in Korean, but in Spanish I am not sure. It is just a different variant that occurs?

The l and trilled r are both alveolar, so I suppose it is easy to mix the two. *shrug*