July 9, 2009

Rock the vote

The website Lexiophiles is sponsoring a vote for the top language blogs. I've been nominated (along with 99 others.. w00t) in the "language learning" category. The power is now in your hands to determine the order of the top 100.

My goal is to crack the top 90. Won't you please help?



[Edit: Catherine at WLT is a better person than me: she listed the other Thai bloggers also nominated. Congrats all around. :)]

11 comments:

  1. This will be fun! And all I ask is that I don't come absolute bottom.

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  2. Hi ricker, I saw a post on anothe blog about a good place to order thai books? I want to get a a few that aren't too tough.

    I was after ฝนตกตลอดเวลา and any others around the same level.

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  3. I'm rather mortified my blog is in the listing. It's not exactly a serious endeavor! I'd asked to have it removed but I assume they needed it to reach 100. :-)

    IIRC Rikker started but never finished ฝนตก. Without much for comparison I can't guess what "level" it's at. Parts were more difficult than others. There's a few scenes (and an entire chapter) that consist of the main character watching a somewhat surreal television news show, and the banter between the commentators was remarkably more difficult for me than anything else in the book.

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  4. 'Catherine at WLT is a better person than me'

    :-) I think it's more that I have a community view of blogging. That if those in the same blogging niche support each other, then the whole community tends to improve and grow.

    You can't blog in isolation, that's for sure.

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  5. @Thomas Where are you located? (Not sure Thomas you are.) My suggestion would differ depending on location.

    @zeroanaphora You're right, I started it, but I'm sure I didn't get very far. I'm currently reading เรื่องรักน้อยนิดมหาศาล (Last Life in the Universe), also by Prabda Yoon. I own the movie but haven't rewatched it in years, so I figured I'd read the rather brief novel first.

    It's not surprising that dialogue is more difficult. I find that reading a novel is easier than, say, watching a talk show with lots of high speed colloquial dialogue. You can control the pace, you can go back and re-read (and re-re-read); you can pause to look things up (but I don't recommend overdoing that), you can be certain exactly which word was actually used, which is hard with fast speech, etc. And then you go and run across passages like that one (which I haven't actually read, I don't think).

    But if you think about it, it's a nice happy medium. You can see the words spelled, and can ponder them at your own pace. But the spellings might be informal, or have senses that aren't in some dictionaries. At least you're up for the challenge...

    @Catherine I totally agree. I was mostly by my lonesome for a while, but luckily it didn't take too long for that to change. Long live our little niche.

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  6. You were alone for a long time in blog years. Except for Stu, I don't know of anyone else blogging Thai back then.

    But now you have all of us following along behind :-D

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  7. Scott Imig's Journey to Thai was active for about a year before me, but he stopped writing shortly after I began in 2007. He posted sparsely in 2008, and hasn't yet posted in 2009.

    It's definitely worth reading, for those who aren't familiar with it.

    And you're right, Stu/Jay was doing periodic posts about Thai (and still does).

    I'm glad to have all the company I do now.

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  8. Even though I have Scott's site listed on WLT, I keep forgetting about him. He has some good stuff in there...

    There are two other rather good blogs that are no longer being updated also (but I don't remember their start dates).

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  9. I've voted for you Rikker as it's surely not going to be my blog. Mine came to a grinding halt after sitting the competency test and was really only meant to be a study guide for me.

    I'm starting to miss studying though and certainly will start blogging again when the studying begins. I'm finding it hard to decide how to continue though, I know I can't motivate myself but I'm not sure I'll ever find a private teacher that can live up to my high standards and keep me motivated and learning for any length of time.

    withnail

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  10. @zeroanaphora

    You don't have to worry about being in our competition, you are merely on the list of nominated blogs, as you were not selected for the voting phase. If you feel you don't even want to be on the list of nominated blogs please let me know. (FYI I have never received any message telling me that you would not like to participate).
    Please also fill me in on why the competition does not seem serious to you.

    @Rikker
    Sorry to use your comments section to contact zeroanaphora. Good luck for the competition!

    Kind regards,
    Marc
    on behalf of the bab.la and Lexiophiles team
    [http://bab.la]
    [www.lexiophiles.com]


    Marc Lütten

    bab.la GmbH | Baumwall 7 | 20459 Hamburg | Germany
    Phone: +49(0)40-707080950 http://bab.la/
    Handelsregister AG Hamburg | HRB 101207
    Geschaftsführer: Dr. Andreas Schroeter, Dr. Thomas Schroeter, Patrick Uecker

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  11. hi how r u? สวัสดี

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