[RadcliffXX]

well, 70% of my speech has to be about my the thai culture. and the other 30% has to be on my own personal views i guess. i don't expect anyone to write my speech for me, lol. i was just asking for some ideas on what my attention-getter should be. so that i can work from there. but i already figured it out, so thank you all anyway.

billk: my speech is only 4-6 minutes long, and most of it has to be researched.. . so that's why i'm unable to talk about my filipino culture too. i've been to bkk before, but it was back when i was 14. i'd like to travel back to thailand soon though. i'd like to wander around the city for a few weeks. thanks again for the responses!

[HarryMet]

i know nothing about my culture. well except for a couple things here and there that a thai friend of mine taught me.

Have you visited www.ThailandLife.com yet? It is written by a Thai teenager about his life growing up in Thailand. You will find a lot of culture there. Many Thais living abroad said they learned a lot from that site.

If you have any specific questions then please come back and post them here. However, please don't expect us to write your speech for you. We can only give you guidance or answer any specific questions.

[RadcliffXX]

hi everyone,
i'm new here, and this is actually my first time joining a forum. - anyways, i'm doing a cultural identity speech for a communications class on thailand.. . because low and behold i'm in fact 50% thai. >_< unfortunately, i know nothing about my culture. well except for a couple things here and there that a thai friend of mine taught me. i grew up living in the states with my mom who happens to be filipino, while my dad continued to live in thailand. i rarely saw him, and we spoke over the phone a lot. but i was never too interested in i guess learning more about my thai culture. he passed away over a year ago, and now i feel incredibly regretful for not being able to take advantage of all the questions that i could've asked. i'd like to make my attention-getter for my speech to be creative. unfortunately, i'm drawing a blank. my professor told us that our attention-getter could be: a rhetorical question, a short story, a quote, or an interesting statistic.

please let me know if any of you can help me out. i'd really appreciate it. khob kun ka. (i don't even know if i spelled that correctly, or said it correctly for that matter.) lol, i'm a lost cause. HELP! thank you.

[PebydataFeents]

What would be most interesting to me would be if you talked about being Pinay+ Thai+ American.

'Coz you have been with your Mom every day you have been able to learn much more about Philippines culture (including language) than Thai culture. Where you are at now sounds like having a strong need to connect with Thai culture to even things up a bit.

BTW: I hope you stick around here after your talk and hope you get to travel to Thailand soon. It's awesome.

[RayFairhurst]

I happened to chat with the poster (Valerie) about the details of her speech. She's got about 4-5 minutes only for the whole talk. To me, that means her topic should really be simple enough to be adequately covered in about three and a half minutes, the remaining time to be spent for the intro and brief conclusion. It should also be interesting enough to arrest the attention of the class for the whole duration.

Initially, for attention getter, we were toying with the idea of talking about a Thai superstition that would sound very strange--or even weird!. Given her constraints, I think that idea is attainable. We have suggested a few superstitions that might really sound out-of-this-world. But may be you can recommend some , too?

[PebydataFeents]

Hi VPM

For those of us who aren't from the States could you please explain what a cultural identity speech is. When we have our heads around that we will be able to make some suggestions.

khob kun ka is as good a way to spell it as any, although khorp might give a better indication. http://www.learningthai.com/useful_phrases.html

BTW: If you are interested in learning Thai there are lots of resources here.

Do you speak Tagalog?

[RadcliffXX]

hi billk,

thanks for the response. sorry i didn't go into detail on what a cultural identity speech was. well basically it's a speech about your culture, your indentity. it's a speech i have to do for my communications class next week. i'm half filpino and half thai, but i decided to only do my speech on my thai culture, because i know so little about it. so i figured i would be able to research and learn about my culture at the same time.

i can understand the dialects: tagalog, and ilocano. but i cannot speak it. >_<

[HarryMet]

I have quite a few superstitions on www.thai-blogs.com. Just google "thai superstitions" and you should find them.

[violetgorman]

Just a suggestion, why not give your speech exactly as you see yourself,as in, what you just described. It would be first hand experience and you can still do research on your Thai heritage .