Better to learn Thai tone rules or Thai vocabulary?

On 6/23/2021 at 3:52 PM, Bredbury Blue said:

 

I'm impressed by SRJ, watched lots of his stuff.

 

I printed off his 'Phonetic Map of the Human Mouth' chart which I often refer to. I memorised the consonants by class lines by line. I found his chart very simplistic and helpful.

 

I made my own table of tones as others have done. Took me an afternoon to memorise,  and then I spent time practicing using it on words to work out each words tone.

 

I found this little 'game' of choosing the class of each consonant fun and very useful.

http://www.thai-language.com/id/838480

 

Once I learnt the script and the tones enough to read basic stuff I was appalled at how I'd been wrongly pronouncing names or things for years. Check out this list of provinces, almost all wrongly transliterated meaning all of us non-Thai pronounce them wrongly - some are way out.

http://www.thai-language.com/id/589833

 

It's definitely worth the effort of learning Thai script and tones, and leave the transliteration nonsense behind.

Left Thailand for a little  so not on the forum much. I think when I followed SJR's mouth map and his open/ closed throat Thai tone explanation my Thai took off. Like you I wrote down my own. I also liked how he says not to worry about many of the consonants as they are not common. it is crazy learning a language with 4 ,'T's'etc.  Now I just do you tube Thai. New on one of the channels is favourite. Cheers