Jump to content

Jonners

Member
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    7

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Posts posted by Jonners

    Highspeed Thai - Quick review

    in Thai Language

    Posted

    From: Nick Johnson
    To: [deleted as per forum rules]
    Subject: RE: Feedback
    Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 02:31:14 +0000

    Hi Vincent,
    I will go ahead and post the feedback directly.
    Re the tones, actually the table is meant to be printed out and used as an exercise to complete it correctly (like attached). In the end I only needed to do this twice while designing it. That made me learn it. I think the tone rules become quite straight forward when you realise so much can be eliminated from the mix and that a completely separate part of the overall learning is concerned with live and dead syllables and high and medium consonants (forget about low - they are all the rest). This was dealt with so well at the outset of your course.
    Maybe your course could encourage students to create their own table - or perhaps there could be a set of anki cards asking which tone marks do what with which consonants and syllables.
    To get to page 212 has taken me 20 days at roughly 90 mins a day on average so say, 30 hours (maybe a bit less). I have completed all the exercises including the anki backlog in doing so. Please note though, I have only encountered a handful of new words so far. However, I am learning to say them and use them properly and gaining huge confidence from it. I even try it out on my wife (who so far had pretty much given up with my Thai) and she is now starting to show support and encouragement.
    Re the months, I learned them by desperately trying to create associations, daft though they may be. A crocodile in July, Macdonalds in January, muddy puddles in February, A friend's wife Tanya (Tanwa) in December, My tuna in June. Rubbish like that, but it worked.
    Finally, I understand your note about trust but do feel free to use my comments in your communications if it helps.
    Regards
    Nick

    Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 11:31:59 +1100
    From:[deleted]
    To:
    Subject: Re: Feedback

    Hi Nick,

    Thanks so much for the feedback. It is nice to hear you are enjoying the program.

    Thanks for table of tone rules. I thought long and hard about including this and decided not to. The reason being is because I felt that students should really try to become fluent with the rules at each step before they move on. And with a tone chart I was worried that users would depend on that too much rather than using their memory. And if they got to the end without becoming fluent at each stage I was worried that it would be very hard for them to become fluent with all the rules. Do you think this could be a problem?

    Good work with remembering the months. You must have a good memory, I think they are one of the hardest things to memorize.

    It would be really helpful for me and other is you could post this feedback directly on-line. People obviously are less trusting of feedback when it is re quoted by the product vendor.

    http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/topic/678970-highspeed-thai-quick-review/

    You can post it in this thread. This is the latest thread about HighSpeedThai.

    Also approximately how many hours have you taken to get to page 212?

    Thanks again




    On 27/02/2014 6:35 PM, Nick Johnson wrote:
    Here is some feedback and note that I have proceeded to page 212 (vocabulary lesson 6 completed) before responding.
    I have been living mainly in Thailand since 2005 and made several early attempts to learn Thai, all of which fizzled out because nothing really went deeper than short term memory. I was using books mainly (Thai for Beginners) and also picking up bits and pieces from Thai speakers. One of the things that really created a wall was the tone rules and word construction especially the vowels.
    When I clicked through the advertisement on Thai Visa.com, I was curious to see if there was anything special about the process that would finally make learning Thai effective and interesting. What I saw in the demos and the description of how the course is structured was enough for me to part with the money and get started.
    Sure enough the structure of the course started working for me immediately. One of the things that has cluttered previous attempts has been the transliteration of Thai words. This course is able to circumvent this very neatly by concentrating on teaching the reading and associated Thai spoken words/sounds without trying to burden the student with learning what the words/sounds mean until they have built up a reasonable level of competence first. Now, for the first time, I visualize the Thai word when I am responding to the course (and not some Romanised representation). This is fantastic after less than 4 weeks! It only takes a little extra patience at the start, but it is more interesting anyway.
    I also endorse the use of the mnemonics for memorizing High and Mid consonants and also the tone rules for low consonants. The dafter the mnemonic, the more effective eh? I then went and created a table of my own to help summarise the tone rules (which I attach). Maybe the course should include something like that?
    Anyway, I am actually enjoying it so well done! As voiced by others, I hope you are being well recompensed for the obvious hard work designing the course. I will certainly recommend to others.
    Thanks,
    Nick Johnson
    B.t.w. - I can even recite the months now!

    post-153591-0-33645700-1393558307_thumb.

×
×
  • Create New...