Has anyone taken private lessons with Thai Style in bkk? www.learnthaistyle.com. I am taking lessons with UTL at Asoke but the fixed hours for the lessons, every morning ot every afternoon, is too restrictive. Private lessons give me more flexibility. I am looking at hiring a private tutor for two hours a day, 5 days a week, for several months.

Not studied with them, but the sample material is pretty poor.  Consider the transcription system for one word:

 

พยัญชนะ Pá-yun-chá-ná

 

The letter "a" and "u" are used to represent the same vowel sound, and the tones for "pa" and "cha" are wrong for normal speech.  (They should both be mid-tone, unstressed, no glottal stop.)

 

 

2 hours ago, Oxx said:

 

 

 

 

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I have studied with them in the UK. It is not so much a school as a platform for finding an independent teacher and selling their own material. Some of the teachers are not that highly trained / experienced, and some prefer to use other materials anyway, so it just depends who you get. I got one poor teacher and one good one. Saying that, I had the same experience with Thai Language Hut in Bangkok (online lessons).

 

I thought the materials supplied by TS were very thorough. The person behind it seems to be obsessively thorough, in fact. She deliberately uses both a and u in her transcription system, and as far as I can see she uses a consistently for some words and u for others. She is so methodical that I think she must be doing this because the sounds are not *exactly* the same to her.

 

Be aware that the transcription system is based on UK English so e.g. the names of the letters are gor etc, which is totally wrong if you speak US English.

Thanks for the advice everyone.

I don’t think that the ‘amature’ phonetics are much good for pronunciation because as Percy Penguin points out there are many vowel variations in English. in learning the special sounds like ง อื ร ต etc. a lot of time is saved by learning the Thai directly when the phonetics become useful as memory aids.


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