500 Most Used - In English Phonetics

[bangkokburning]

I have searched the thread above and found some tools that appear to be useful, but I am looking for a down and dirty spreadsheet of the 500 most used words in phonetic Thai / English.

I have dl'd the Quick and Dirty PDF which is wonderful, but super unweildy for making flashcards and I can't print it out as I don't have a printer and ... it has so many pages. I think I will in the end use it, but it will be a slog on a 10" netbook.

Not to get off topic - can anyone highly recommend a book w/ cd? The Becker books? When I had a look at them, they appeared dry.

Thank you

[Tod Daniels]

The Benjawan Poomsan Becker books with the c/d's are a bit dry, but will give you a good working vocab and more importantly an idea of thai sentence structure (which is NOT english sentence structure).

Once you get thru the first two books, Beginners, and Intermediate, you should have a sufficient grasp of high frequency thai vocab words, and thai sentence structure to begin formulating sentences you think up, rather than parroting out frozen phrases (which are extremely useful but limiting). You could also do her “Speak Like A Thai” series which are pretty good as well.

As far as phonemic transcription of the 500 top thai words using english. That's a tough row to hoe, and I'd still say learning to read even basic thai will go further than recognizing a thai word written in engrish.

You're correct; the newspapers are a hard slog for an intermediate reader ONLY because there are so many ministries of this-that-and-the-other, as well as way too many politicians who have mile long thai names to boot. Add in the use of abbreviations for the plethora of political parties, idioms, etc and you can spend a long time deciphering an article.

However, even a person who has high-beginner to low-intermediate reading skills can read ANY gossip rag out there about thai superstars, cartoons, small books, signs, menus, etc. It is far and away more valuable to read thai than karaoke engrish thai.

Perhaps making cards, with both the thai spelling of a word AND the phonemic transcription would work for you. BUT given the large number of karaoke engrish thai methods that are out there, unless you pick one, say Benjawan's method, learned all the obscure character representations for the sounds/tones etc and stuck with that one only, you'd be running yourself in circles.

Reading is nothing more than word memorization, so when you see it, you know its meaning in your native language as well as a close approximation of how it sounds in thai.

IMHO, Teaching yourself, or using your significant other to learn to read is a very valuable skill set and will take you much further than learning karaoke engrish thai.

[DavidHouston]

Forgive me for my naive question; I am not a teacher or linguist.

I would like to understand why you wish to learn 500 words, rather than 500 sentences. Given that your desire is to learn to communicate with one or more Thai people, would it not be more efficient to learn full communications rather than individual utterances? Fully composed ideas, whether in complete sentences or in fragments, provide you with a more significant ability to communicate, rather than stringing together words which in the aggregate may not be in a syntax which is understood by your audience. Furthermore, there are resources out there which do give you full sentence capability.

Would you consider learning sentences, rather than just words? Thanks.

[Tod Daniels]

Forgive me for my naive question; I am not a teacher or linguist.

David; for someone who professes to be neither a teacher nor a ‘cunning-linguist’ ; you certainly give some of the best advice concerning the acquisition of the thai language on this forum.

I would imagine that 500 well composed, yet succinct, sentences for different situations would far and away be better than 500 stand alone words. Words which as you pointed out may or may not yield the desired meaning if thai language rules are not employed in sentence formulation.

Given the fact that many of the sentences will have similar constructs with only some word variation; IMHO only makes adopting this type of 'situational thai' approach more advantageous.

Great idea.

[HappyInCM]

I second that. Excellent. Here's some from learnthaifromawhiteguy.com SRS Sentences « Learn Thai from a White Guy including 100 in spreadsheet form.

The only thing here is to get a Thai person to say them for you so you get the sound right. I think there's a posting somewhere here about a site where you can exchange voice recordings - i.e., you do some in english someone somewhere wants and ask that someone do the same in thai for you.

[Gwindarr]

The site where you can exchange voice recordings is rhinospike.com. While I've had good results with a few languages, the only Thai recordings I have gotten so far were pretty awful. Until that site has more people, I would just get someone to record it for you. Then the biggest challenge is getting a Thai person to say them naturally.

David is absolutely right about learning sentences as opposed to words. Don't waste time and energy. Stand-alone words are much harder to remember out of context and are of little use while you are still thinking in your native language.

Gwindarr