Good Thai Conversation Book?

[ldn]

I tried to search conversation book from language schools but haven't found any. Any ideas?

[HappyInCM]

I guess it depends on what level you're at and/or whether you read Thai script.

For beginning beginners to intermediate beginners, I think the becker practical thai conversation books good. That series has a bunch of small books with CDs for basic conversation, idioms, and some other things. Of course, the pimsleur CDs are also OK, but without any text to go along with it, I find it a bit hard to follow.

[meadish_sweetball]

The Becker books and Teach Yourself Thai are decent starter books that prepare you for typical expat or tourist vs. Thai and 'getting around'/'buying food' conversations. I'd say it is a good thing to drill tones as well because it's essential, but after that, just get out there and practice, learning conversation from books is good to have a blueprint of accurate sentences to form your own sentences from, and to listen closely to the rhythm and sound of "correct" speech, but once you have done that you will learn more by just practicing.

It's not a bad idea to try to 'play out' conversations from books in the beginning as you can be more confident of the subject. If you embark on subjects you have no experience of it may all just get too confusing. One such example is to ask for directions to a place whose location you already know. That way you can focus on how a Thai presents the information you already know instead of desperately trying to keep up (one of the first hurdles is to be able to make sense of normal-paced speech). I found that approach useful anyway.

In the same way you can practice listening comprehension by catching radio and TV news broadcasts after having read the world news online on a few different sites. You know the outline of the story so you can relax a bit and focus on vocabulary and sentences.

[klons]

These aren’t books but you can go to this link. then Search Thai, click learnthaipodcast.

Then starting on page 2 there are some public conversations. I thought they were

pretty good and spent about month on them.

If you ghttp://podcast.com/

If you can find a used bookstore, you might find some written for Thais to learn English

and then you just use them in reverse. I bought a few atop Seacon Square, but that store is no longer there. They were about 30 baht apiece.