leah

This sounds a lot like this topic:

Pinyin is actually a great tool for Chinese people themselves, and wasn't specifically created for the benefit of foreign learners (though it's an enormous help -- said from experience!). All Chinese children learn it before they learn how to write the real way, so it perfectly captures all the sounds and tones of the language. I wonder if a transliteration system HAS to come from the Thai government --maybe it's possible an outside body could champion its system as the new standard, just like standards develop in the tech industry. After all, it's not exactly fair to expect the Thai gov to do this for us -- we wouldn't have expected the US to create the system to create the transliteration system to convert English letters to Thai sounds! Of course that's about relative importance of the languages, but it's worth noticing, especially since these English-Thai transliterations do exist and are popularly used in learning-English books for Thais. So basically we expect the Thai gov to produce systems going both ways. It's quite possible the US gov would have been just as incompetent if faced with this task!

I don't think the government has any reason to think that a system like that would usurp the Thai alphabet. Even in Chinese, which has both a far more difficult writing system and an official transliteration scheme ("pinyin", as someone mentioned above) that marks sounds and tones in the Roman alphabet, natives still learn how to read and write using hanzi characters and show no interest in abandoning their system. The Thai alphabet works perfectly well for reading Thai, and Thais have no problems learning how to use it. It would make it easier for foreigners, though given that the Thai gov has already created one official transliteration scheme, it's probably not a top priority to refine it further for our benefit. Maybe one day.

There are some discussions/arguments going on now between Benny the Irish Polyglot and linguist Steve Kaufmann, mostly about topics touched on here - whether or not it really is possible to learn a language fluently in 3 months, whether enthusiasm and talking is all it takes, etc.

http://thelinguist.blogs.com/how_to_learn_...a-language.html

http://thelinguist.blogs.com/how_to_learn_...s-and-wine.html

Here's another fluent farang: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWxKNFLs8xI

and another: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLRKvqKrgao

Both are young guys who appear very fluent. Would love to know how they learned!

For those who didn't make it over to his blog, he mentions there that he recorded that video over 15 times and edited out the parts where he didn't understand what was going on. I credit him with honesty for letting his readers know that, since obviously it would have been outright deceitful not to mention it at all. However I am left thinking his main accomplishments were the ability to say a few greetings and read a bit. This would actually be fine (certainly many people have accomplished less than that in even years, out of sheer lack of effort) except it is far, far from his original claims and runs counter to his assertions that a positive attitude is all it takes. Softwater, I have to agree that he is trying to build himself up to sell something - he has mentioned a future ebook a few times.

No comment on Marky45y's dilemma, but I'll say that the guys insisting that Thai girls must be lying and it's "2010 not 1960" are only revealing their ignorance of Thai society. Outside of the bar scene, most Thai girls are far more conservative than their Western counterparts and are much more likely to stay virgins until marriage. I have met many Thai virgins in their 20's, 30's, and beyond, and it's not considered particularly strange.

Looks great. now if only it weren't in PDF format....

Maybe he'll be in here to update us himself, but I saw that he made a video about it, showing that he can produce some of the tones. He also made the connection between Thai tones and the tones we use in English for asking a question, making a statement, etc. - this isn't a particularly novel idea (most resources on learning Thai will mention it), but it's always good to be reminded that tones aren't really that foreign.

It also looks like he made an updated post today with his rules and shortcuts on reading Thai. One thing I'm surprised by is his insistence that everyone warned him it takes months/years to read or told him he can't do it, because I haven't seen anyone say that at all, and in fact quite the opposite. With that said, his shortcuts seem pretty good, and actually gave me a new idea to try, to remember the alphabetical order of the letters (something I've never quite gotten down) by associating each one with its order number.

"it is revealing because it attempts to automatically complete the sentence based on what searches were most done with the same words."

From what I've read, this s a common but not entirely true assumption. While it is one factor, Google's auto-suggest also takes into account what pages exist and what ads are available to show.

I frequently use 'doo gone'.

Am i wrong?

Up-country, you are absolutely correct, though it sounds slightly abrupt by itself so you might want to dress it up a little, e.g.:

kor doo gone krub

ขอดูก่อนครับ

I came across an interesting blog post a couple days ago. This guy has a method to learn Thai in 8 weeks. He has successfully learned several other languages before, so it should be interesting to see how far he gets in Thai - he wrote that he'll document his success with a video. It seems like he is going to begin by focusing on reading and producing the tones.

I guess I can't post the URL here but it is the most recent entry at fluentin3months dot com.

[Edit: http://www.fluentin3months.com/thai-in-8-weeks-mission/]

Just checked this topic for updates and realized I mistakenly wrote low-low for ตลาด last time (I'm sure you all realized it's supposed to be mid-low and politely refrained from correcting me). Figures ;-) I think I have actually heard it pronounced that way in the south but it's obviously not standard.

Mangkorn, I realize there are rules behind the spelling and didn't mean to imply words are spelled via a random occurrence of letters. But when I see the word ตลาด I know it's low - low because I recognize the word by its spelling, not because of those rules. Maybe this is what's meant by internalization, though it seems like something less fancy to me ;-). And, if I came across the word ข้าว and didn't remember the tone, most likely the context of the sentence would tell me whether it meant rice or white and only one pronunciation would make sense.

Really I just want to give encouragement to people overwhelmed by all the rules, as I was once, since they seem to create a lot of confusion (and some interesting memorization systems...). In my experience regular reading and writing proved more useful than memorizing rules; of course other people may find them a useful learning aid, in which case they should carry on :-).

After taking a 6-week course in reading and writing, and feeling overwhelmed by all the rules to remember while reading, I was relieved to discover that Thais themselves are not thinking through the tone rules when they read. Many of them have only the foggiest idea that these rules even exist. Now I do what they do, which is ignore all the rules and remember the tone based on spelling. Even if I haven't seen the word spelled before, I can usually pick the right tone as there is only one pronunciation that makes sense in that context. If I'm unfamiliar with the word entirely, well, knowing the tone by rule wouldn't help me then anyway, since I'd still have to look it up.