Thai Girl Speaking English

[Taco]

After watching this video you'll understand why most men prefer Filipinas over Thai women.

[Yohan]

Many people from the States and UK expect wherever they go everybody can understand English.
They are often even totally unwilling to learn foreign languages, getting even angry when they meet people abroad who cannot understand them.

However it has to be said, as a visitor to Asian countries you cannot always expect that ordinary locals without higher education can understand what you say.

If you cannot speak the local language, you have to be very patient, maybe bring a dictionary with you and a phrase book...

About SouthEast/FarEastAsian languages, most of them are quite difficult to learn for foreigners who speak only English -

You need many hours of exercise to be able to communicate in Asian languages like Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese etc.

Some of those languages have a difficult writing system too.
If you want to go to somewhere in such a city, ask the hotel front to write your destination down in local writing, otherwise the taxi might bring you to somewhere else...

[mattyman]

The Thai writing system is a syllabic alphabet, in which every consonant comes with a default vowel, the sound is changed by diacritics/letters. Vowels are marked by letters that can be in front of (like Eglish), below, above or behind the consonant. There's also this system of syllable-initial vs. final, low, middle and high consonants. I'll talk about the details of the Thai script in the languages sub-forum.

The difficult bits about Thai strike me as being the script and the tone rules. The grammar of Thai looks like a piece of piss; no tenses, no cases, none of that bloody rubbish. Once you've good the script, tone rules and so-forth sussed, it looks easy.

Another syllabic alphabet is the Devanagari script used to write Hindi.

Japanese Hiragana (what I started learning earlier this year) is a syllable alphabet in which each letter is a syllable; there's a symbol for each syllable.

Scripts that are syllable based might be daunting.

Look at omniglot.com, look at the different types of writing system. Well worth checking-out.