A Little Quiz 4 U Thai Language Learnerz

[Tod Daniels]

Here's a short quiz I found in the back of a book I've had around quite some time called "Introduction to Thai Reading" by Rungrat Luanwarawat (sorry couldn’t find her name in thai (ISBN-10: 9745241032, ISBN-13: 978-9745241039).

The entire back section of the book is tests similar to this one, as well as crosswords, matching, etc. I found the exercises quite entertaining and useful.

Even though this is a basic test, and certainly uses basic words; I did worse than I thought I would on it. I don’t necessarily know the words by rote, (plus never learned the tone rules, stupid me ). Instead I use context when reading to discern between similarly sounding and/or spelled words and can usually guess them right. This quiz making me choose between similar words, sadly left me flummoxed except for the few I knew from my typing thai course.

Here it is have fun;

1 - คนไทยกิน ___ ทุกวัน (Thai people eat rice every day)

a - ขาว

b - ข่าว

c - ข้าว

2 - ใส่ ___ สีแดง (To wear a red shirt)

a - เสื้อ

b - เสื่อ

c - เสือ

3 - หนึ่ง สอง สาม สี่ ___ (One, two, three four, five)

a - หา

b - ห้า

c - ห่า

4 - ___ น้ำหึ่งขวดหน่อยค่ะ (May I have a bottle of water)

a - คอ

b - ข้อ

c - ขอ

5 - คุณ ___ ถึงเมื่อไร (When did you arrive)

a - มา

b - หมา

c - ม้า

6 - ใคร ___ ไปเที่ยว (Who wants to go out)

a - ยาก

b - อยาก

c - หยาก

7 - ถ้าไม่สบายต้องกิน ___ (If you are sick, you must take medicine)

a - ยา

b - หย่า

c - ย่า

8 - คุณพูดไม่ถูก คุณพูด ___ (You did not speak correctly, you spoke wrong)

a - พิด

b - ปิด

c - ผิด

9 - ดำ ขาว เขียว แดง เป็น ___ (Black, white, green, and red are colors)

a - สี่

b - สี

c - สี้

10 - อาหารที่นี่ ___ มาก (The food here is very fresh)

a - สด

b - ซด

c - โสด

(edited for a formatting error )

Here's the answer key;

( 1 - c, 2 - a, 3 - b, 4 - c, 5 - a, 6 - b, 7 - a, 8 - c, 9 - b, 10 - a )

Edited February 11, 2010 by tod-daniels

[kokesaat]

Todd,

If you can read that stuff and still don't know your tones, I'd suggest investing some time in Benjawan Becker's Beginner's Book. Hallucinate, meditate, medicate on one set of tone rules (I found the high consonants and their associated tones the easiest to learn...then the middle consonants.......leaving the largest group, the low consonants for last). If you make any headway, you might want to invest in a one-on-one Thai teacher for a few hours to be sure you're on track. As much Thai as you already know, you'll probably find the day when things fall into place not too far down the road.

Knowing the tones (even if it's just the major rules without all the exceptions) makes a world of difference. Good luck!

[singa-traz]

9 out of 10 correct.

I can remember the tones rules, but I still can't hear nor pronounce the tones properly (most of the time).

I have concluded I'm tone deaf. Any known medicine that will cure me?

[kokesaat]

"Any known medicine that will cure me?"

An understanding, patient, one-on-one teacher will do the trick. My teacher works in my village pharmacy. I teach her English, she me Thai. While she's not a teacher, she's educated and knows the rules and her ear knows when I make the right sound.

For what it's worth, I have tinnitus and a partial hearing disability. I convinced myself I also convinced myself I'd never understand the tones. I can't imagine being able to crack the 'tone' code in a classroom......one-on-one was what did it for me.

[Tod Daniels]

“kokesaat” Thanx for the advice!! A person might think with me hanging around my thai language teacher friends as much as I do, I’d be better. Unfortunately, early on when I met them, I made my house a “thai free zone”, and they only speak english when visiting me

In reading most thai stuff, I can make out the words from context without a problem. Same as listening to spoken thai (IF I already know the subject we're talking about ), I'm fine and understand the gist of the story if not the minutia .

The BIG problem I have is in picking out similarly spelled or sounded words from a test like this. In that regard, I freely admit for the record, I TOTALLY SUCK . Actually that test made my personal assessment of my thai language skills fall about 3 levels (personal levels NOT anything that relates to anyone except me, so no worries ).

The "matching", the "fill in the blank", the "synonym/antonym", even the frickin' crossword puzzles in that book, I'm FINE with, and get them easily. Just like the learningthai-dot-com site I can do sentence order, crosswords, etc.

However this test really brought me up short.

Glad you guyz (and gurlz too) thought the test had at least some value. ..

I think, reading at least, comes down to word recognition. If you don't have that word "hard coded" in your brain (where if you see it, tone marks and all, you know BOTH the pronunciation and it’s meaning in your language) you're unlikely to know it as a stand-alone word like in this quiz.

.

Another example (one that I use frequently with my thai friends to show how hard the thai language is, is this set of words:

เขา - he, she, they, them, him, her

เข่า - knee

เข้า - enter

and

ขาว - white

ข่าว - news

ข้าว - rice

To the untrained listener, they are all pretty frickin' similar, but after a while here I started to first hear the falling/rising tones. That's about all I can make out in your every day colloquially spoken thai, even though I still know what they’re saying.

Thanx again.

Edited February 11, 2010 by tod-daniels

[Tod Daniels]

One more thing;

Here is a pic of my learning thai 'resources' which were scattered hither and yon around my house but I laid out to show I am SERIOUS as a heart attack about learning this language.

ANYONE wanting to copy any of the stuff I have; if you have some text book you want to trade (as in let me copy it for something I have) lemme know via P/M..

As you might notice, I am a thai language resource "hog". A person might think I could speak, read, write better than I do with this volume of stuff. Sadly most of the stuff must be used in conjunction with a fluent thai speaker to get the most ‘bang for the baht’.

(Sorry the pic is poor quality)

[Groongthep]

Another example (one that I use frequently with my thai friends to show how hard the thai language is, is this set of words:

เขา - he, she, they, them, him, her

เข่า - knee

เข้า - enter

and

ขาว - white

ข่าว - news

ข้าว - rice

To the untrained listener, they are all pretty frickin' similar, but after a while here I started to first hear the falling/rising tones. That's about all I can make out in your every day colloquially spoken thai, even though I still know what they’re saying.

Thanx again.

To make things even more confusing, this word: เขา [3rd person pronoun] he; she; they; them; him; her, is irregular. In everyday speech it is usually pronounced เค้า with a high tone.

Edited February 14, 2010 by Groongthep

[ThaiClub]

Anyone else get 100%?

[tgeezer]

To make things even more confusing, this word: เขา [3rd person pronoun] he; she; they; them; him; her, is irregular. In everyday speech it is usually pronounced เค้า with a high tone.

Even worse it is increasingly more often written that way too, forceing anyone who reads it to say เค้า, when if it were written properly, เขา you could pronounce it either way.

Here is an example of use of the real word เค้า: ฝนตั้งเค้า meaning 'it looks as though it will rain'.

[anchan42]

If you change the consonant from ข to ก, you will get something very unusual.

เกา – to scratch

เก่า - old

เก้า – number nine

and

กาว - glue

ก่าว –Not a word in Thai that I know of. Possibly an accidental lexi gap.

ก้าว – to take a step

เก้า and ก้าว are pronounced the exactly the same ie ก้าว but the other two pairs are pronounced differently.

Edited February 19, 2010 by anchan42

[Groongthep]

To make things even more confusing, this word: เขา [3rd person pronoun] he; she; they; them; him; her, is irregular. In everyday speech it is usually pronounced เค้า with a high tone.

Even worse it is increasingly more often written that way too, forceing anyone who reads it to say เค้า, when if it were written properly, เขา you could pronounce it either way.

Here is an example of use of the real word เค้า: ฝนตั้งเค้า meaning 'it looks as though it will rain'.

Another such irregular word is the question word ไหม. According to it's spelling it should be pronounced with a rising tone but in eveyday speech is usually spoken with a high tone and often written มัย. It seems to me that มัย for ไหม and เค้า for เขา are usually used on internet forums, in comic books and in text messages where very informal speech is the norm. I am not as good at reading Thai as I wish I were but I can't recall seeing these substitutions being used in any formal writing although I may be wrong.

[Tod Daniels]

Here's another quiz (taken shamelessly from the KarnTV site) at http://www.karn.tv/thai.html which Rikker posted about in another thread.

It's called ข้อสอบมาตรฐาน ภาษาไทย ป.1 ชุด 1

Here's the link:

http://www.karn.tv/c_thai/files/test/stand...andard_v1-1.pdf

(I also added the test into this post as an attachment too.

AGAIN, I had ZERO problems in reading/understanding ANY of questions or picking the correct answers to the questions I knew. However anything to do with toning and/or pronunciation I totally sucked at.

The final tally, 50 questions asked, 36 correct answers. With only 3 choices in these multiple choice questions I had a 33.3% chance of guessing right; BUT if I didn't know it, I left it blank), so missed a total of 14 questions.

Dismal really, and all due to my neglect in learning the consonant class, tone marks/rules.

Sad.. It is truly a dark day in my path to thai language acquisition. ..

Oh, and the answer sheet is at this link;

http://www.karn.tv/c_thai/files/test/stand...standard_v1.pdf

(Edited TWICE; as I didn't know attachments couldn't contain thai text in the title, it came out as jibbrish. ..)

examination.pdf

Edited February 22, 2010 by tod-daniels

[Tod Daniels]

Hmm, I not sure I agree with the answer they give for number 49 in the above test I posted about.

It is about the word(s) "แก้วน้ำพลาสติก" and they ask the question; how many words how many syllables?

The answer they give is (ข): ONE word word, 5 syllables, although I picked (ค) 3 words, 5 syllables.

Aren't there 3 individual stand alone words in there; glass, water & plastic?

Also in the thai spelled but clearly engrish loan word plastic พลาสติก. If someone used thai pronunciation guides wouldn’t it be more like Pa-lat-sa-dtik?

I mean wouldn’t พ stand alone as a ‘pa’ sound, then ลาส become the second syllable like a ‘lat’ sound, with the ส used again as a stand alone ‘sa’ consonant sound and finally ติก the final consonant with the ‘dtik’ sound yielding a total of 4 syllables?

I find english loan words drive me crazy in any thing written in thai. It is especially so when reading about the thai dara or superstars. I’m reading along fine, and then I hit the thai spelled but engrish words, Pancake, Benz, Bank, Beam, Natalie, Paula, and it throws me for a loop.

Oh well, back to the studying..

EDIT - - Sorry If I'd have bothered to type พล into thai-language dot com I would have had my answer. I certainly didn't mean to post any more inanely than I normally do.

Edited February 22, 2010 by tod-daniels