Something That I Think Would Come In Handy But Don't See Anywhere

[JohnGotti]

I just want to see very common sentences, one after another. Show the sentence in Thai and written English and then explain what every word means. And then show similar sentences, perhaps with the same words but moved around (when possible)... basically, just keep hammering away like that...

instead, what is commonly available in literature and online is only individual words, in which case you do not know how to use them in a sentence, nor their connotation.

thai-language has some sentences, but nearly enough. this leaves me going back and forth from my dictionary to a Thai person.

I would like a long book of just endless conversations from one person to another.

Edited May 13, 2009 by JohnGotti

[agent69]

I just want to see very common sentences, one after another.

ผม I เพียง just ต้องการ want ที่จะ to เห็น see ประโยค sentence ธรรมดาฯ very common ประโยคต่อประโยค one after another ครับ

Show the sentence in Thai and written English and then explain what every word means.

แสดง show ประโยค sentence ใน in ภาษาไทย Thai และ and ภาษาอังกฤษ English แล้ว then อธิบาย explain ว่า คำแต่ละคำ each word หมายความ mean ว่า อะไร what ครับ

Anyone wanna help for the rest?

I think you might wanna give google translate a try. Not perfect but you can play around with it.

PS. I added khrup so that it sounds a little more courteous.

[meadish_sweetball]

'Teach Yourself Thai' is built roughly like that. It gives you a good base to start from. I think the Becker series are fairly similar as well.

I don't like the romanised Thai in 'Teach Yourself Thai', but the dialogues are authentic sounding for polite conversations of the kind you will have as a new language learner and fairly new to Thailand.

[klons]

I just want to see very common sentences, one after another. Show the sentence in Thai and written English and then explain what every word means. And then show similar sentences, perhaps with the same words but moved around (when possible)... basically, just keep hammering away like that...

instead, what is commonly available in literature and online is only individual words, in which case you do not know how to use them in a sentence, nor their connotation.

thai-language has some sentences, but nearly enough. this leaves me going back and forth from my dictionary to a Thai person.

I would like a long book of just endless conversations from one person to another.

My wish list is Thai movies, videos, tv shows etc., spoken in Thai with subtitles in Thai script of what is said. There is no money to made in that, so it is only a wish. They do do that in Karokes, also some soap opera clips, kids audio books, commercial clips, VOA broadcasts to be found on the net, but that's about it. With Karaoke how do they handle tones and vowel lengths while singing ? The Becker books are a great value (according to me), I bought 4 of the Speak Like a Thai type books w/cd, for $11 each U.S., on Amazon. I don't see how she makes much money off that.

[loong]

'Teach Yourself Thai' is built roughly like that. It gives you a good base to start from. I think the Becker series are fairly similar as well.

I don't like the romanised Thai in 'Teach Yourself Thai', but the dialogues are authentic sounding for polite conversations of the kind you will have as a new language learner and fairly new to Thailand.

I started to learn Thai with "Teach Yourself Thai" by David Smyth and found it excellent for the beginner. It also encourages the learner to start to read Thai without feeling out of their depth.

I always think it a great shame that he never expanded this into a series.

The Becker series are good but I think that if David Smyth had followed up with intermediate and advanced, it would have been better.

[Jungian]

I have a book like that I bought in the US but since I have been here I find it absolutely useless unless I am having the same conversation every time. I guess it is good for tourists but if you live here forget it.

[DavidHouston]

I have a book like that I bought in the US but since I have been here I find it absolutely useless unless I am having the same conversation every time. I guess it is good for tourists but if you live here forget it.

Jungian,

I have a suggestion for you. It might be of great value to you and to the community if you were to record some of the common conversation that you hear in everyday life. We hear on this forum and others from many students of Thai who are true systems and software development experts. They have and continue to develop new and exciting software for our use. These sites and tools are systems rich but content poor. That is, they tend to lack depth, not accuracy.

You would do the community a great service if you were to write down these conversations you hear and variations you find useful. You need not get all the spelling right or fully translate or transcribe the conversations; others would be glad to help help. Certainly someone in this forum would be happy to include your notations and recordings in his site.

Thanks; you have a great idea.

Edited May 14, 2009 by DavidHouston

[JohnGotti]

Mr. Houston pmed me the following, which I hope he does not mind me reprinting here.

John,

We at Thai-Language.com have lots and lots of sentences in the database. Our objective is to have an illustrative sentence for each word in the database. Some of the more common words have a number of sentences. The process is much as you have described: The Thai sentence is displayed; the English translation follows, as colloquially as we have managed; then, you can look at each of the words which make up the sentence with the definition which is particular for that usage in the sentence; finally, you can choose to see a transcription in roman letters or IPA for the sentence as a whole.

What we do not have is, as you describe, common conversations with variations of vocabulary included, something we used to call, "thinking in English". I think this would be a great addition but we need someone to create the dialogs and sample sentences, as well as someone to do the variations around the themes. I suspect that there are language training materials used by the various language schools which provide this type of approach.

I wish you the best of luck in your studies.

[DavidHouston]

Thank you for that reprint. I think that the time has come to coalesce a number of ideas previously articulated in this forum:

1. Members of this forum, as well as others wishing to participate, should work on developing a set of useful Thai dialogs. In contrast to the normal method of schools creating dialogs the schools think would be useful, let's turn the tables and have us, as Thai learners, determine what would be useful for us. Let's start with a manageable number of, let's say, 10 dialogs of no more than 10 lines each.

2. There are several ways to craft these dialogs. We could write them in English, concentrating on what our needs are. Some of us could, then, attempt translations into good but colloquial Thai. The final step would be proof reading and corrections by a native Thai speaker. Controversies would certainly arise between "correct" speech and "colloquial" speech. Only one of our designated Thai referees would make the final call.

3. It is important that these dialogs, once completed and accepted, would be non-proprietary. Anyone and everyone would be encouraged to use these dialogs as part of their learning process. We would all be encouraged to create variations in words, phrases, and sentences to broaden the utility of this process. The converse of the non-proprietary nature of this material is that no one should copy existing dialogs from books, language teaching material, or any other published sources for use in this dialog creation. This material must be independently developed for this purpose.

4. Site developers would be encouraged to include this material on their learning sites. We would measure our success by the extent to which these were included in other websites as well as being widely disbursed and used by others. The crowning success would be if these were included in for-profit school training materials. Just consider how many existing Thai language training sites freely use the Lexitron dictionary and its associated materials; our aim should be maximum utility for learners and broad distribution.

This is just a brief outline; we should certainly hear the opinions of others. We have been encouraged to take our learning into our own hands; let's assist each other and perhaps supplement what others have created and use commercially or otherwise. Instead of complaining about what is lacking; let's fill the void.

What do you think?

Edited May 14, 2009 by DavidHouston

[loong]

The sentence builder thread in the pinned section was useful, but has died a death.

I agree that a series of everyday dialogues would be a very good idea.

[BigSnake]

Close this Thread please, most barely speak Thai, you are talking about writing it here

[Rikker]

There's definitely something to be said for David's idea, but I think that starting with authentic Thai is a better strategy, and working on idiomatic translations of those. Anyway, it's a lot of work.

This is somewhat related to the idea behind Thai Video Transcripts, but not precisely so. I'm still waiting for someone to fill in the missing gap there -- making it easy to take those transcripts and generate dynamic subtitles that play atop the YouTube video. So far the built-in subtitling feature on YouTube only allows you to subtitle your own submissions, and I haven't seen a good substitute yet.

Another possibility the OP might be interested in is the Thai-English bitext reader on SEAlang. You can optionally show or hide the English, and there are texts of varying difficulty levels. (Granted, the list of stories is presented a bit unwieldily, though -- as one super-long dropdown menu.) The other advantage there is that it includes several types of texts, including short non-fiction, short fiction, and news. For the adventurous, there are even has abstracts from academic dissertations (but the English on those ones isn't very good).

[kriswillems]

I like you idea very much David and I've thought about something similar.

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/Free-Thai-La...te-t263767.html

http://www.thai-language.com/ubb_cgi/ultim...c;f=26;t=006267

If we would develop contents of high quality, it could be sent/offered to the thai-language.com website.

We could ask that what we add to this website is GPL licensed. But then I saw you wrote this:

> The crowning success would be if these were included in for-profit school training materials.

I understand why you say this, but personally I don't think something like that would be good for the following reasons:

- Software developers are proud people and many of them don't like that their free work is being used by others to make profit (without even mentioning the name of the original developer).

- Such a permissive attitude would allow the for-profit schools to put their own copyright restrictions on the hard work of others.

- If we give something for free to the community it seems fair that the community also shares improvements and extensions they make to this free work. The success of open source software is the GPL license. Without this license there would be much less open source software (only software with BSD style licenses would be left).

I realize that developing software and developing "Thai Language courses" are not the same. But I also think only a GPL license could really motivate people to create Thai Language courses.

For people that don't know the GPL license: it just says that this piece of work is being freely distributed and that any modifications to the work (made by the original author or others) should also be freely distributed (with the same license).

[DavidHouston]

I like you idea very much David and I've thought about something similar.

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/Free-Thai-La...te-t263767.html

http://www.thai-language.com/ubb_cgi/ultim...c;f=26;t=006267

I acknowledge that these ideas were originally yours; hence, my note that my posting was merely an amalgamation of other's ideas. Yours happens to be the most well thought out and the best-articulated and the one that takes developer sensitivities into account.

If we would develop contents of high quality, it could be sent/offered to the thai-language.com website.

We could ask that what we add to this website is GPL licensed. But then I saw you wrote this:

> The crowning success would be if these were included in for-profit school training materials.

I understand why you say this, but personally I don't think something like that would be good for the following reasons:

- Software developers are proud people and many of them don't like that their free work is being used by others to make profit (without even mentioning the name of the original developer).

- Such a permissive attitude would allow the for-profit schools to put their own copyright restrictions on the hard work of others.

- If we give something for free to the community it seems fair that the community also shares improvements and extensions they make to this free work. The success of open source software is the GPL license. Without this license there would be much less open source software (only software with BSD style licenses would be left).

Can commercial enterprises copyright something that is already in the public domain?

I realize that developing software and developing "Thai Language courses" are not the same. But I also think only a GPL license could really motivate people to create Thai Language courses.

For people that don't know the GPL license: it just says that this piece of work is being freely distributed and that any modifications to the work (made by the original author or others) should also be freely distributed (with the same license).

Kris, you are well-versed in this technology and license set of issues. You can be in charge of the project as a whole and do what you think best for the end product. Now, can you get anyone to participate? It is much easier to nay-say and criticize than it is to actually do something constructive.

[kriswillems]

Hi David,

Yes, a company can copyright protect a product in the public domain if they would extend or modify this product and if the product would have a BSD style license. Apple made MAC OS-X. They reused huge parts of BSD licensed software (BSD linux), which is a result of community effort. They modified and extended the software and they sell it for big money, under their own license.

I personally like a GPL license more.

Next month I'll start working in BKK, so I'll have less free time. Anyway, I am willing to try.

- In which framework would we post our work? Do we create a new web-site or do post the contents on thai-language.com under GPL license. I feel more for the second option, because we would get more readers and we could still move to our own web-site later on. If we use thai-language.com we also have a free and fast host, which saves us some expenses. Are there other ideas? What about setting up a wiki? What about using moodle?

- Who's willing to help? We need 3 kinds of people:

people with knowledge about Thai language

people that know how to develop web-sites (technically)

people with a feeling for layout and graphic design

I have knowledge about software development in general but I am not an expert in writing web-sites. I have knowledge about graphic design and some knowledge about Thai.

Edited May 15, 2009 by kriswillems