my partner for 14 years speaks very clear and good understandable thai (ภาษากลาง)

with me. we comunicate only in thai because she does not speak any english.

 

if i pronunce a word wrong, she does spell it to me. this helps me also to know the 

right tone. but she is not able to tell me just the tone of the word!

 

i know, thai children learn the tones by listening. is your thai partner able to tell you

the correct tones of a word (or syllable)?

 

Sometimes. She has to stop and think about it, might change her mind a couple of times, but can sometimes tell me. She just automatically knows how it sounds and how to pronounce it, but can't always communicate that to me. It's easier to just have her spell it for me, then I know.

Native Thai speakers will of course always pronounce the tones correctly, however they won't always know the correct name of the tone eg เสียงเอก ตรี สามัญ ฯลฯ.
Just like in English, native speakers won't always know the correct grammatical terms for the different parts of speech they use.

The average Thai person doesn't know the tone rules.

We probably all learned at some point about the different tenses of verbs in the English language. But if you would now give me a random sentence I could not tell exactly which of the 12 different tenses a verb is.

For some words the pronunciation in spoken Thai is also just different from how you write it.

Can you tell the tone or intonation of words of your mother language?  Or of other languages spoken in your home country? (Remember,  central Thai is not the mother language of most of our partners)

 

Examples:

"a hundred dollar bill" Please explain the intonation.

"¿Quieres otra cerveza?"  vs "Do you want one more beer?" Please explain the difference in intonation. 

 

Probably you don't know what I am talking about. 

So, why should your partner be smarter than you? 

 

 

 

Do you want her to tell you the name of the tone or pronounce the tone clearly so you can hear it?

 

My wife and other family members will pronounce a tone clearly including long and short syllables. They may say it a few times for me to get it, but then get bored and walk away.  I've learned this is a precious resource not to be abused. I probably had to encourage them to do this in the beginning.

 

Teaching tones to a native speaker of a non-tonal language is very repetitive and boring. Not something TGs with an attention span defined by tiktok would like.

Tell your partner to spell the word for you:   problem solved.  I do this with my wife all the time.

 

I would never ask.   

On 5/14/2021 at 2:55 PM, Kiujunn said:

Teaching tones to a native speaker of a non-tonal language is very repetitive and boring. Not something TGs with an attention span defined by tiktok would like.

indeed so.