Work online, work as a teacher in China or Korea for six months out of the year and then live in Laos for six months. Cut your costs by living on farm and eating what you yourself have grown. My goal is to save $200,000 by the time I am 32-34. At that point, I can open up a guesthouse, buy some farmland and a truck. Then maybe six months out of the year go to work abroad.

Your command of English is quite good and if your Lao is anywhere near as good as your English then you can find work as a translator and probably make around 18-20,000 USD a year once you've established yourself. You'd have to live in Vientiane which is not really all that bad.

My Lao is not nearly as good as my English. My spoken Lao is decent but I am barely literate and it is very difficult for me to read. I am working on that and plan to devote at least an hour a day for the next few years. If I could find work as a translator, I'd jump at the opportunity if I could make more than $900USD/month.

Your profile says you are 25. Bro, if you can already speak good Thai and Lao and are in the process of learning Khmer, you could probably get into linguistics and turn that into a career. You are still young. I still have a silly dream of going back to the US to study linguistics myself. Almost nobody has a good command of Lao, Thai, and English. Just go to Laos and get into teaching, accept that yes, you will only make $100-300 a month. Work and save a few thousand in the bank as a backup plan while you're in the states. If you are sociable and amiable then you could probably get tips and make more than $300/month working as a tour guide. If you start to learn minority languages then you can probably get a scholarship or funding from a university and start publishing scholarly papers. If you are 100% falang like me you can go to the countryside and provide a few hours of language instruction a week in exchange for food and shelter. Even if you are the product of miscegenation, most Lao will be open-minded and tolerable to you and will still respect your English skils. The possibilities in Lao PDR for a person who is truly passionate about anthropology are nearly limitless. Or go to Xishuangbanna, PRC and teach English and start studying the Dai minority language and Chinese.

Really I wish I had your experiences growing up as a child. Living in the United States for 20 years and never having taken language study seriously before going to Asia, it is now difficult and time consuming to pick up these languages. I'd probably have to devote a full two years solely to learning Lao before I could write well in the language.  I have acquired truly nauseating habits during my upbringing because suburban American life is so superficial and boring. The US is only 250 years old and most of the so-called culture is actually a form of corrupted culture borrowed from an immigrant group or it is a product peddled and promoted by soulless greedheads whose motivations are money, power, and control.

Check out SEAlang.net. If anything else, it will give you a lifelong hobby that is relatively inexpensive and enormously rewarding. For the past few days I've dedicated most of my free time to studying linguistics, Lao grammar in particular. Check out some articles by Nick Enfield. The man is truly an inspiration and I have a lot of respect for his work.

I haven't taken advanced engineering or mathematics courses but I know many mathematicians and engineers who have spent years living abroad and cannot speak a word of the local language or any language other than English. I take your point though. It is easy to pick up languages; it just requires persistence and lots of time.

I don't know how you could crappity smack up in the villages unless you were yelling or acting belligerent towards the inhabitants. I have spent a lot of time in villages all over the south of Champasak and generally people are very hospitable and will provide the necessities of life for free. A foreigner could probably live for free in Laos and walk from village to village and live there for a few weeks before moving on to the next village.

Your point about words having a concrete definition is incorrect. Many concepts in English have only incongruous parallels in Lao. A good example would be "ພູ" which phrasebooks and dictionaries translate as mountain or hill. In fact, based on my own experience and the observation and writings of linguist Nick Enfield, "ພູ" refers more generally to mountainous or hilly terrain. In other words, there is no word or concept in Lao for a mountain as a thing itself. There are any number of examples. Even terms for basic posture and emotions are not entirely equivalent between Lao and English.

Read this article:

Enfield, N. J. (2008). Linguistic categories and their utilities: The case of Lao landscape terms. (N. Burenhult, Ed.)Language Sciences, 30(2/3), 227 – 255. doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2006.12.030
http://nickenfield.org/publications/

ba dac wrote on 23^rd Nov, 2013 at 11:34am:

I just moved to Inner Mongolia from Thailand. It's a good thing that I'm an old married man. My students are indeed attractive and some dress like models.