Routledge "Colloquial Thai" (free audio)

[onebir]

Is available here. The recordings seem about right for the level (eg clear, not too fast,  + tone practice & extra conversations for listening.) Separate recordings of the vocab lists would be useful though.

 

Details of the book here (+ there may be scans on the interwebz). Based on the reviews, the book's pretty good for 'survival thai', but has the drawback of a funky transliteration system and no thai text for the dialogs. (This also makes it difficult to remedy the lack of vocab lists using text to speech.)

 

 

[tgeezer]

I listened to 1 and then 25 to see how complicated it was and think that I could manage to write out the dialogue. It might make a good topic here. I am a shamed of my spelling but don't want to waste time looking up spelling (ไม่สนุข) so corrections will help me too.  
Here is the first dialogue. 
สนุขไหมคะ

สนุขครับ

อาหารอร่อยไหมคะ

อาร่อยมากครับ 

เผ็ดไหมคะ

ไม่เผ็ดครับ

เอาผลไม้คะ

เอาครับ ขอบคุณมากครับ

คุณชอบอาหารไทยไหมคะ 
ชอบมากครับ

 

[onebir]

2 hours ago, tgeezer said:

I listened to 1 and then 25 to see how complicated it was and think that I could manage to write out the dialogue. It might make a good topic here.

 

Let's hope it catches on ????

Actually, there are Thai script versions of about 10 of the dialogues in the book, so there's an easy way for you to check your spelling etc for those.

[tgeezer]

I find that Thai friends don't bother too much with spelling. I make sure I get it right when I have to. 
The words which I was not sure about in that dialogue were อาหาร อร่อย I can't remember if there were others and to look would be cheating I think. 

[Oxx]

สนุข s/be สนุก.  That's the only mistake I could spot.

[tgeezer]

Thanks Oxx,

So now I shall remember the difference between  สนุก and  สุข  

[JHicks]

On 11/22/2020 at 10:38 AM, tgeezer said:

... so corrections will help me too.  
Here is the first dialogue. 
สนุขไหมคะ

สนุขครับ

อาหารอร่อยไหมคะ

อาร่อยมากครับ 

เผ็ดไหมคะ

ไม่เผ็ดครับ

เอาผลไม้คะ

เอาครับ ขอบคุณมากครับ

คุณชอบอาหารไทยไหมคะ 
ชอบมากครับ

 

You wrote อร่อย the first time but อาร่อย the second.

[tgeezer]

On 12/1/2020 at 12:14 PM, JHicks said:

You wrote อร่อย the first time but อาร่อย the second.

555 thanks. It was a dialogue, and I think that I might actually say อา in practice but I wouldn't say ร่อย ! Nothing  surprises me any more! It just demonstrates how bad my Thai is. I am re reading ไวยากรณ์ไทย out loud now saying every word correctly, it helps enormously because the same words keep reappearing. 

[JHicks]

I haven't got a great deal to do just now, so I measured the duration of the first vowels in อาหาร and อร่อย. You can always argue about exactly where one sound ends and the next beings, but basically they're all within a whisker of each other - say 80ms +/- 10%.

 

I've read (and found) that for unstressed vowels in natural speech, there is often no measurable difference between the supposedly short and the supposedly long version. Perceived difference is another matter because the perceiver knows that the vowel is long or short (as the case may be) and registers the pronunciation as correct, so may well insist that there really is a difference... but it's just an illusion. Of course if you have a word pronounced in isolation, as in "It's Friday and our word of the day is อาหาร", you may well get a genuine long vowel in a normally unstressed syllable - but that's an artificial case.

[tgeezer]

On 11/30/2020 at 4:17 PM, kokesaat said:

 

 

On 12/2/2020 at 8:14 AM, ColeBOzbourne said:

 

Sorry about the quotes I can't get rid of the boxes. 
 

I like your post very much, thank you. 

  As I said in my post when I come to write those two words I have doubts about the spelling but two spellings of the same word is another aspect.   I have daily contact with.a Thai now on Facetime because I am stuck in UK so I discuss Thai more often. I mentioned the dialogue and suggested that I was actually writing my spoken Thai, I was not contradicted. อาหร่อย is my reply to อร่อย it seems like elderly men say คร๊าบ sometimes. In my Line golfing group one lady golfer writes คร๊  where the lady caddies write ค่ะ it is almost as if they feel that they can't be "slack" in their position.  

 

 

 

[JHicks]

Here's the same thing in image form (the screenshot shows "อาหารอร่อย"). I got slightly different numbers but it's the same pattern - unstressed "long" a is the same duration as unstressed "short" a, but stressed long a is much longer.

 

There's no stressed short a to complete the picture. There are a few elsewhere in the dialogue, but they're in particles and particles can behave strangely (as you say) so I didn't do the measurement.

 

The blue line is the pitch BTW. The pitch tracking can be a bit off, especially when the voice is at a low level. You can see the rising tone of อาหาร turning the corner at the transition to the n sound, but in reality it doesn't shoot up the way the tracking shows.

[JackGats]

Some info regarding Colloquial Thai. I bought the book through Google (32 euros). 90% of the book is useless since it is transliteration-based (what a waste!) but I bought it just for the sake of having an English translation of the dialogues. Starting from the translation and using Google translate it is not too difficult to reconstruct the dialogues in Thai. What irks me is that I'm not able to download the e-book for off-line use. I can only read it online through my Google "library". Still, I think the 32 euros are well-spent, for the dialogues are brisk and real.

[donnacha]

The current edition (2nd edition, July 1, 2015) is also widely available on the book torrent sites. PDF + the same 111 audio files available on the Routledge website.

[JackGats]

8 hours ago, donnacha said:

The current edition (2nd edition, July 1, 2015) is also widely available on the book torrent sites. PDF + the same 111 audio files available on the Routledge website.

Thanks for the tip. Too late for this buy but I'll remember to check the torrent sites next time. Never been a fan of bootleg sites. Always felt you had to try out dozens of them before any one worked.