Cultural Takeaways With Educator Frank Smith [Season 2, Episode 64]

To help us ring in 2018, we're bringing back a prior guest
on his annual pilgrimage to Bangkok. Frank Smith from UC Berkeley
teaches Khmer to children of Cambodian refugees. We caught up
with him in person at Bangkok's Central World mall… before we got
kicked out by security. Yes, again. Not just because one of us
made a foot faux pas.
What's it like for a Thai speaker who doesn't live in
Thailand to plop back into Bangkok, suddenly surrounded by other
Thai speakers? There are actually lot of ways to keep up with the
evolving language, thanks to the pervasive nature of the
internet. Or what's it like when your a young
person, with parents speaking their native tongue and all your
friends and the world around you speaking English? Frank faces
that every day in the classroom, and shares some interesting
tidbits from his students. Also, Frank reports the
Bay area of California has a sizeable and well-knit Thai
population, so we press him for some impressions (from the
outside, obviously) on how that contingent live their lives
abroad, which makes for a nice parallel for those expats like us
living in Thailand. You'll also hear Frank bust some
myths we've heard (and may be following) as we both struggle our
way through learning Thai. And on Love, Loath, or
Leave, we talk about not having easy access to clean drinking
water. And by "easy", we mean getting it straight out of the tap.
It's pretty obvious where we fall on this question, but your
mileage may vary depending on where you are from.
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