New Book On Learning To Read Thai

[bankei]

A new reading text book for Thai, Thai Reader, is now available for download

from http://readingthai.wisc.edu/index.html.

by Robert J. Bickner

Professor (Thai) and Chair

Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia

University of Wisconsin

[Groongthep]

I've only taken a few moments to look this over but on first impression it looks to be a terrific learning tool. Thank you very much for posting it.

[Tod Daniels]

Someone obviously went to a LOT of time and trouble to make this resource, especially as it's free.

I wholeheartedly concur; thanx for posting the link !!!

(Maybe the mods can change the title to "New FREE E-Book on Learning to Read Thai" to better reflect it is free and online)

[canuckamuck]

Thanks for posting that, I think it will be quite useful.

[kokesaat]

Fantastic find! I'm still working on Thomas Gething's reader and Vol II by Professor Bickner will be a great follow-on. Now.......if only the readings were recorded!!!!!

While Gething's reader is dated, his lessons follow a nice pattern of introducing new vocabulary/patterns, then repeating them in follow-on lessons. While I haven't had the opportunity to see if Bickner does the same, I'll take a guess that he does....as that seems to be the pattern of teaching in the US.

Thanks for the link!!

[Rikker]

At last! This has been a long time coming. Very glad to see it finally released to the world.

[leah]

Looks great. now if only it weren't in PDF format....

[Chrubble]

an impressive and useful resource for all of us. A western quality text, with Thai styled voice. A+

[Colonel_Mustard]

Whenever I click on the link I get:

Directory Listing Denied

This Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed.

Any ideas on what the problem is?

[JimShortz]

Me too... any ideas anyone?

[JimShortz]

Here I go; talking to myself again...

The answer to my own question is that you need the actual page name included in the URL to get to the page, hence the link needs to be:

http://readingthai.wisc.edu/index.html

Hoorah!

[Rikker]

The link used to work without specifying index.html, I think. They must have hamfistedly tweaked something.

In any case, I just updated the link in the original post to avoid further confusion.

[JimShortz]

The link used to work without specifying index.html, I think. They must have hamfistedly tweaked something.

In any case, I just updated the link in the original post to avoid further confusion.

I think the reason the link no longer works without the actual name of the index file is that they've made it so that you can't search the site index, and hence you can't use a website download programme (e.g. httrack) to download the whole site to your hard drive - I know it doesn't work; I tried (just to test the theory of course..)! I guess many people would do this for fear of such a great bunch of PDF files disappearing from the web were the site to close down.

The site total is about 160mb if you download all of the PDFs (which you are perfectly at liberty to do so long as you do them individually now!) and I guess people downloading the whole site was giving them massive traffic that they didn't want or couldn't sustain on their server...

[kokesaat]

The link used to work without specifying index.html, I think. They must have hamfistedly tweaked something.

In any case, I just updated the link in the original post to avoid further confusion.

I think the reason the link no longer works without the actual name of the index file is that they've made it so that you can't search the site index, and hence you can't use a website download programme (e.g. httrack) to download the whole site to your hard drive - I know it doesn't work; I tried (just to test the theory of course..)! I guess many people would do this for fear of such a great bunch of PDF files disappearing from the web were the site to close down.

The site total is about 160mb if you download all of the PDFs (which you are perfectly at liberty to do so long as you do them individually now!) and I guess people downloading the whole site was giving them massive traffic that they didn't want or couldn't sustain on their server...

Now if someone could come up with mp3 files that go along with the pdf files (as in Thomas Gethings Intermediate Reader series), the result would be one heck of a learning aid!

[Gaccha]

Looks great. now if only it weren't in PDF format....

I can think of two issues concerning you:

-it's slow to load because it's PDF

-you can't 'extract' the Thai and paste it somewhere else

Fear not, simply download 'Foxit reader' for free. It is way faster than PDF (the files open instantly) and it allows text extraction.

[bangkokrick]

Thanks for the link.

Cheers, Rick

Edited March 27, 2010 by bangkokrick

[Gaccha]

Fantastic find! I'm still working on Thomas Gething's reader and Vol II by Professor Bickner will be a great follow-on. Now.......if only the readings were recorded!!!!!

While Gething's reader is dated, his lessons follow a nice pattern of introducing new vocabulary/patterns, then repeating them in follow-on lessons. While I haven't had the opportunity to see if Bickner does the same, I'll take a guess that he does....as that seems to be the pattern of teaching in the US.

Thanks for the link!!

No. It specifically rejects this style of learning. Please see the lengthy explanation of modern learning methods here:

http://readingthai.wisc.edu/thai-reader-site-intro.html

The text is intended to develop text interpretation skills and not to increase vocabulary.

[Parvis]

Everybody always falls in love with his/her "pet theory" especially if formulated by him/her. Learning-methods is a "tough subject" - much "controversy and ignorance" persists. I tend believe more those who evaluate a theory on this subject - not their own - and have at least a Phd in Neuroscience and Neurobiology incl. Psychology.

In other words the best method for you is "to study the Language" rather than the controversy around "the best methods".

Edited March 29, 2010 by Parvis

[Murf]

Page cannot be found...

[harrry]

Page cannot be found...

I think the link has been misposted. I removed the index.html and it worked.

[makescents]

The page has been renamed to htm rather than html.

http://readingthai.wisc.edu/index.htm

[SoloFlyer]

So can someone who has downloaded them all post them here as a zipfile perhaps??

[makescents]

So can someone who has downloaded them all post them here as a zipfile perhaps??

http://rapidshare.com/files/372303388/Thai_Reading.rar

[SoloFlyer]

that is very kind of you, thanks.