Learning Thai. My Experiences/advice/ramblings!

[ChiangMaiAjarn]

My apologies if you have read this before. I posted it originally in reponse to a post in the ladies forum, but thought it might be useful to some folks who read this forum...

I have made use of lots of different materials in my Thai learning journey (that is far from over...). Here's my two penneth worth on how to go about learnig this wonderful language!

Lessons, preferably in a small group for me, are really valuable and dramatically improve your rate of learning - but I have a full-time job and a small child, hence I mostly study by myself whenever I can and practice speaking with friends! My recommendations for self-study are:

• Rosetta Stone Beginners Thai for use on the computer is great for building vocabulary and simple sentence structures - repetitive, but this works for me! The software, however, only uses Thai characters (no transliteration) so is useful to beginners who can at least read a little! I came upon this only recently (I regard myself as lower intermediate) and have found it very useful at this stage of my language learning. They also do an English version (2 actually, one USA and one UK English) - useful for your Thai friends.
  
• Pimsleur Thai (30 half hour MP3 files) are a great place to start for beginners, and focus a lot on correct pronunciation - they take the words apart and teach them from the end syllable by syllable, also they come back to words and structures as the lessons progress. Very well considered lessons in my opinion. Great for those who spend time traveling to and from work, so long as you don't mind gibbering in public as you practice speaking!
  
• Linguaphone - don't waste your time and energy (I did, far too much - almost put me off learning Thai!) - appalling! Has its own bizarre and horrible transliteration system and no sensible learning structure. Yuk.
  
• Colloquial Thai (book and audio set, published by Routledge) - A complete beginner course. I learnt a lot from this, but I think the title is misleading; If you know no Thai at all it will quickly become too difficult - It would be better to complete the Pimsleur audio lessons first, then use this book. I liked this because it is all about questions and responses, forcing you to think about the language and not just repeat like a parrot (Linguaphone styley!). On a negative note there is no use of Thai characters and it uses a phonetic system peculiar to this book only (as far as I can see).
  
• Banjawan Poomsam Becker's series of books/CDs/Computer materials/dictionary/Palm software (Paiboon Publishing). My personal favourites, and a great place to start, although I think using a variety of different materials gives you a more interesting learning experience.
  Here's why I like this set of materials: They use a well considered and consistent transliteration system throughout (making it worth you while learning the sounds of the few strange characters); they build logically; they use both Thai characters and transliteration (although they don't do much of a job of teaching you to read Thai characters: see below for a better method of dong this).
  On the negative side: some chapters are tedious, particularly in the intermediate book (beginners less so), and I pick and choose what I use - not perfect then, but better than most other materials. The consistency between books and dictionary is very valuable to me. The dictionary has red, blue and white stripes on the cover and I thoroughly recommend it. They also do an electronic version for Palm (small handheld computer) and I have recently bought a Palm just to install the dictionary - far better for foreigners than Cyberdicts (they are aimed at Thais learning English) - and now carry that with me everywhere. The case is also my wallet so I have to carry it! I even paid for this software (45 dollars from their website)!
  
• Lastly, but not least (I'm getting tired!) don't learn Thai without visiting www.learningthai.com
  They have a huge amount of stuff to help you on your journey, but, in my opinion, the most valuable thing they offer is a foolproof way to learn to read Thai without the need for a teacher. What it teaches you (over a series of 22 lessons, each with listening, speaking and reading components) is how to read most vowels and the most common 23 consonants. After that you are on your own, but can already read most signs, menus etc. Great and free - full respect to the people who made this (Thai Department at Sriwittayapaknam School) who state on their website "One of the most popular Thai Readers for primary students for many years has been "Manee and Friends". The book has been long out of print in Thailand. When we first proposed doing this internet edition, many of our teachers were very excited as they have fond memories of these characters. We are pleased now to share this book with our foreign friends who have so graciously decided to make an attempt at learning our national language." Gotta love 'em! Go to www.learningthai.com/books/manee/
  
  
• Okay - really lastly - I'm now learning the alphabet (in it's proper order, like I know the English one) using a series of 4 foam jigsaw thingys from Tesco. Splitting it into four section, and playing with the puzzles (not really a jigsaw; putting shapes into holes) with my son makes it really manageable!
  

Good luck everyone. I hope my ramblings are useful to somebody out there, and give you a more direct route to learning the language than I have used. Other people's opinions/ideas very welcome. Please!

[stevehaigh]

i highly recommend Thai reference Grammar by James Higbie

http://www.amazon.com/Thai-Reference-Gramm...8944&sr=1-2

very well written and complete guide to thai grammar. easy to find in Bookazine.

steve

[desi]

Great list

(and thanks for posting it at the ladies forum)

I use a range of different methods. A bit of what's helped me is...

its4thai.com

Langhub.com

Learn Thai Podcast

My Thai teacher is filling out the spreadsheet in The Quick and Dirty Guide to Learning Languages Fast so I can do a marathon 7 day wordfest. I'm planning on taking the seven day vocab and inputting then into either Anki or ProVoc. We'll also record the words so it's not just reading. If that works, I'll go the whole 30 days.

I just figure that anything I try will add to my vocabulary and understanding of the Thai language. For me, the trick is not to get bored so I'll be trying out quite a few methods, then keeping what sticks.

[ChiangMaiAjarn]

My Thai teacher is filling out the spreadsheet in The Quick and Dirty Guide to Learning Languages Fast so I can do a marathon 7 day wordfest. I'm planning on taking the seven day vocab and inputting then into either Anki or ProVoc. We'll also record the words so it's not just reading. If that works, I'll go the whole 30 days.

I just figure that anything I try will add to my vocabulary and understanding of the Thai language. For me, the trick is not to get bored so I'll be trying out quite a few methods, then keeping what sticks.

Thanks for some more useful ideas Desi. I've been looking at Anki - it seems like a great idea. How about sharing any files that we make for it? There's one (the Thai alphabet) available at the Anki aite, but that's it for Thai. Lets share!

[desi]

Thanks for some more useful ideas Desi. I've been looking at Anki - it seems like a great idea. How about sharing any files that we make for it? There's one (the Thai alphabet) available at the Anki aite, but that's it for Thai. Lets share!

Excellent. There's also a product made (I believe) by Apple but I can't get into the files. I'll post it here when I find it again.

pm on the way...

[Nicky72]

I have used Rosetta Stone for some time and found it quite good -especially for people with a basic understanding on how Thai language actually works. But it is quite expensive so you should make sure that you stick to it before purchasing it.

More recently I have found a new software called L-Ceps Personaltrainer Thai which uses a similar audio-visual approach like Rosetta but offers some of the things that I was missing in Rosetta (e.g. Translations - in Rosetta Stone it was not always clear what the meaning of the pictures is). Furthermore the software allows for either using Thai characters or transliteration and it includes 5 lessons with common Thai phrases and can be used on Windows, Mac and Linux.

What I am missing is a description of Thai Grammar but you can print out Thai vocabulary cards which is quite helpful for learning on the road.

I think there is a free trial on their website: http://www.l-ceps.com/en/thai/learn-thai-ptrainer.html

[mynextgig]

I used - Colloquial Thai (book and audio set, published by Routledge) - when i 1st started learning Thai and i have to say that i found it invaluable.

My approach was to read a chapter and then listen to the audio clips of the conversations over and over again until i could memorise each one and then when i talked Thai i could pull different parts of each conversation into whatever conversation i was having.

The downside was that i only learned a single specific meaning for the most of the words i knew and so i would often hear a word and think that i understood what was being said, but then found that the word had a completely different meaning in the context it was being used.

That said, i learnt around 1200 words from this book, all whilst i was living outside of Thailand and was able to have fairly meaningful conversations on my 1st trip back to Thailand. Several years later i can still remember many of those conversations and i think it provided me a good intro into learning Thai.

Do not however try to learn to read Thai from this book. It doesnt cover any of the basics and will completely confuse you.

[MKAsok]

Linguaphone - don't waste your time and energy (I did, far too much - almost put me off learning Thai!) - appalling! Has its own bizarre and horrible transliteration system and no sensible learning structure. Yuk.

I have to disagree with you about Linguaphone. I made a previous post about comments similar to yours here. I believe it to be the best self-study course for Thai by quite a long way. There's a good reason why the University of London SOAS use it as the basis of their Thai Language 1 course. What exactly do you mean by 'no sensible learning structure?'

mk

[desi]

A couple of weeks ago, I got around to checking out Byki Thai from Transparent Language. I knew it existed, but didn't want yet another PC based Thai learning software so didn't pursue it. Also, the amount of languages they supported worried me.

In a wild moment, I emailed to see when their Mac version would be out. They are not quite ready to release it, so sent over the Spanish version for the Mac, along with Thai learning sets. All I had to do was import the Thai and I was ready to go.

I'm interested in learning Thai via a SRS method (Spaced Repetition System) so Byki is perfect as it's a complete SRS package. They've done the work so I can now stop all the hard work of creating my own.

Creating flashcards with sound is time consuming. I've clearly spent more time creating then studying. But, I wasn't in love with what's out there. I wanted more control over the transliteration style and what I was learning. And with Byki, it's easy to change anything you don't like.

And when I run out of lessons, I can put all the stuff I've created into their program, then share with other Byki users.

I can also grab from a SRS like Anki or ProVoc (I have lessons in each), or even bare spreadsheets or word docs.

And for personal use, I can import from any of the other Thai language lessons I own (for personal use, obviously).

There's a free download for those who are interested.

Edited September 30, 2008 by desi