Tangent about Thailand

Sorry off topic. Have you ever visited Thailand? They use the phrase: “same same, but different”, a lot. For non native speakers the phrase works beautifully but for some reason native speakers usually don’t understand immediately.

No, I didn’t visit Thailand.
You sure you did not mean to say that for NATIVE speakers the phrase works beautifully?

Nevertheless, it’s probably a good phrase in English too :slight_smile: as a reminder / heads-up for the double-meaning of “same”.

Off topic continues. I was watching this from a side. An American tourist arrives to motorcycle rental company with motorcycle and his friend. He tells to a rental lady that he enjoys the motorcycle he rented earlier and he brought his friend to rent a motorcycle slightly different than his. The lady doesn’t understand this gentleman and he tries again to explain that my friend here would like to rent a motorcycle and no effect, clearly from the side it’s easy to judge that rental lady expectation is that there is something wrong with the motorcycle and customer is trying to complain. Anyway finally, after many failed attempts, when the very frustrated tourist use the magic words “same same but different” while pointing to the motorcycle the message goes through and his friend gets a motorcycle.

In Thailand for non native speakers especially with lower English skills this would have been their first wording in the situation and everyone would have understood each other from the beginning.

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Haha. We clearly need an universal language, perhaps Morse code

People tried to standardize already 130 years ago: Esperanto - Wikipedia although it hasn’t been a great success.

Yes, I had read about it, and it seemed to me superior than any natural language I know (in terms of easiness, consistency…).
If frogs could fly :unicorn:… most schools in the world would offer it as a foreign language course, and then it would become the best international language