I find it difficult to understand what Thai people say. For the moment I am not in the Kingdom but hope to return soon. When I have been in Thailand and sometimes "studied" Thai by listening to recordings, people understood what I said but I couldn't understand them. I have had several conversations with taxi drivers from Isaan where they didn't understand my English and I didn't understand their Thai, but we had some type of "conversation" where I spoke my very poor Thai and they spoke English.
I have studied other languages, also Asian, but I have never previously enocuntered a language so difficult to understand. Now I listen to the Glossika sentences. They seem well chosen. I am somewhere in the middle stages. I often struggle to understand the sentences. But if I read the sentences (I read the phonetic and Thai script so so), I recognize the words after which I can understand the sentence when I listen to it. I "know" the words but I don't recognize them when I hear them.
Some of it is naturally due to poor knowledge of tones. (Also my knowledge of the precise structure of the sentence with "filler particles" like hai and dai, lacks.) But my impression is that Thai is very variable in pronounciation and structure and therefore difficult to understand for a foreign learner. Is that correct?
Has someone else here used the Glossika sentences? They are useful and the webpage works well. But the man who reads them does not sound like when I listen to the Paiboon dictionary. Words are drawn together like "la liaision" in French which is also difficult for foregners. He also speaks pretty fast. (I now reduced speed by 10%.) Is this how Thai people speak in general? Is the problem of understanding Thai due to variations in pronounciation and structure of the language?
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