I love Japan, I really do but they speak almost 0 English and their language is really hard to get good at.
Also taxes in Japan seem to be quite high, on par with the Netherlands.
Baltic states look interesting! According to google Estonia has a fixed 20% income tax.
Although I'm not sure how to pick between them, all three look kind of similar. I've also surprisingly never heard about someone migrating there for financial purposes. I've always thought of the US as the only place to make a lot of money.
You are right about the taxes in the Baltic countries - in all three you can get ~20% effective tax (minor differences between the countries). And they are really similar otherwise.
Most people in a similar situation to yours pick Estonia. It is the most focused one on tech, supporting startups, and overall the most developed one (relatively speaking). Also seems to be the most expensive of the three.
Lithuania has the most business-oriented culture in my experience. Otherwise a nice and chill place.
Latvia is maybe not the best in the above regards (though, not too far off either), but I would say it has the most stuff going on and things to do overall.
This is an exaggeration. I also live in Thailand, and I just got a library card at the very stately Neilson Hayes library last week. A bit pricey (3000 THB/year) but amazing ambience since the library was built in 1860.
Yea $100 bucks a year for a small historical library with a very limited selection of English books (that's 45 minutes away from me) doesn't really compare to a free library that's in every city in the US (or many libraries in bigger cities)
it's odd to me that you'd expect a large stock of English books in any regular Thai library
even in Japan, with perhaps the very strongest reading culture in the world, you're going to find a relatively limited selection of books in library outside of their own language
you'll likely have less success finding a varied stock of Thai books in Oregon, to the surprise of nobody
There are hundreds of great ones, but Tale of Genji (classic), The Master of Go (amazing if you like the board game Go), Coin Locker Babies (Ryu Murkami > Haruki Murkami), Out by Natsuo Kirino.
I mean there are actually quite a few public libraries here, but of course the selection is primarily in Thai. I don't know why anyone would expect otherwise.
To the above posters credit, it sounds like their claim of exaggeration was spot on (he didn't say it was a lie). You didn't say their libraries don't compare to US ones, you said they don't exist.
I haven't been to Thailand, but I assume there are also libraries at the universities. The parent appears to be referring to a tradition of public libraries, so these are not really counterexamples.
I've used private English libraries in various countries of the Middle East and East Asia. For the expat community, they were really a treasure before the internet.
University libraries are sort of a mixed bag. They're not really advertised but they're fairly open to public browsing in some cases, however pretty locked-down in others.
It can sound significantly better but there’s a couple hoops you have to jump through - and even then it’s decent, but not the same as Siri.
You need the user to download ‘enhanced’ or ‘premium’ voices in the settings app.
(Settings -> Accessibility-> Spoken Content -> Voices -> [Language of choice] -> [Voice of choice] -> Enhanced or Premium)
In the app you have to search for the enhanced or premium voices when doing TTS.
Yeah, I use a premium voice but was still disappointed when we added the feature to my reader app. I decided to leave it in the app since we'd already built it at that point, but it's kind of a bummer since obviously they could use Siri-level TTS if they wanted to.
Yes, their quality is great but the cost is astronomical — I pay about $8 in Azure TTS bills alone for TTS-ing a 500-page book (what you can scan per month with a $10 subscription), whereas Eleven Labs would be about $100 for the same length. I found Azure to be the best bang-for-the-buck, although I'm on the lookout for more affordable high-quality TTS, which would also let me drop the price point of the app.
Sorry but this is utterly pointless. One of the very first sentences I was given was grammatically incorrect ("My name Natalie."). The speaker's voice sounds terrible and robotic. The voice recognition is likewise terrible. The pauses are way too long. One of the worst language learning websites I've ever seen. You'd be much better off just talking to ChatGPT via conversation mode in the app.
