Talking Dictionaries

[JetsetBkk]

Anyone have experience of using - or of their Thai partner using - a "talking dictionary"?

I want to get one for my g/f and I see some that have many Asian languages, but I need only English and Thai.

I don't know much about them, although I believe some give examples of how the word in question is used in a sentence. That seems a good feature.

[Puccini]

All talking Thai-English-Thai dictionaries I have ever seen talk only in English, not in Thai, ie they are designed for Thai learners of English, but it's been two years since I last checked them out. If there now should be one that talks also in Thai, I would be interested in it, too.

[Goshawk]

i got one 5 or 6 years ago to help Mrs G's poor (at the time) english..

ok at first, but the sound spoken was very 'stephen hawking'ish' in its pronunciation & often difficult to decipher, also not very loud.. Sold it a few months later.

it was the Talking-Dict brand, maybe they've improved since then...?

[JetsetBkk]

Thanks for the replies. I'll have a look at what's available and try to sample them all.

The last time I looked was in Big C in Lampang where they had a good selection but I didn't have time to test them all or check what they could do.

I really do hope they have one that speaks in Thai as well as English as I would like to use it too.

Mind you, there's Thai, northern Thai, Isaan, southern Thai... I suppose Talking-Dict only do Bangkok Thai which is a shame as my g/f comes from the north and it sounds very different from Bangkok and Isaan dialects.

[meadish_sweetball]

The dictionaries do Standard Thai which is not quite the same thing as Bangkok Thai. Standard Thai is the formal language taught in schools and used by newsreaders and in other formal functions. While it is based on the Central Plains dialect, it is much more carefully pronounced than what most people in Bangkok use in a non formal setting.

I doubt any commercial outfit will have bothered to develop text to speech synthesis for Northern Thai. The usefulness of Northern Thai is quite limited. Unless you plan to retire to a remote village in the North, Standard Thai will be much more useful. You can learn Northern Thai through interaction with Northerners after you have learned Standard Thai to a reasonable level.