Rosetta Stone

[JayBlake]

A friend has given me his copy of Rosetta Stone - Thai as he became pretty fluent awhile ago and has since moved from UK to "live the dream" of running his own Scuba business.

Before I leap in head-first, does anyone know if this is the "best" program for someone who speaks and understands more than he speaks but who is incapable of reading so much as a single character of the Thai alphabet, let-alone a whole word?

Or should I consider a different method (I live in the UK so on-on-one teachers would be expensive and time consuming).

I'm usually pretty good at using self-teach methods of learning (guitar, harmonica, computer programming and maintenance, electrics, plumbing and car engines etc).

Any experiences gratefully received.

[ludditeman]

A book called "Teach yourself Thai" by David Smyth

Is about the best all round book i have found.

Covers Thai script and language.

[dean999]

A book called "Teach yourself Thai" by David Smyth

Is about the best all round book i have found.

Covers Thai script and language.

Totally agree. I'm rubbish at learning from a book, but even i can understand and follow it.

I find with the book, it teaches you Thai you will use. For-instance, i brought linguaphone and once you get past the first section, it was rubbish. The first section was meeting people and intruducing yourself. After that it was teaching you colors and time ect. That sort of thing could be learn't later, it's not very important. Well, unless you work in Thailand.

Teach yourself Thai, is very good and you won't be disappointed. I brought the book and CD's. I haven't tried the CD's yet, so can't comment.

Forgot to say. I watched someone use Rosetta stone, it was the Spanish one. My opinion is, it look a complete waste of money. He was saying the words correct and it kept saying he was wrong. I would hate to think what it's like with Thai......as it's a tonal language.

Edited November 16, 2011 by dean999

[JayBlake]

A book called "Teach yourself Thai" by David Smyth

Is about the best all round book i have found.

Covers Thai script and language.

A book called "Teach yourself Thai" by David Smyth

Is about the best all round book i have found.

Covers Thai script and language.

Totally agree. I'm rubbish at learning from a book, but even i can understand and follow it.

I find with the book, it teaches you Thai you will use. For-instance, i brought linguaphone and once you get past the first section, it was rubbish. The first section was meeting people and intruducing yourself. After that it was teaching you colors and time ect. That sort of thing could be learn't later, it's not very important. Well, unless you work in Thailand.

Teach yourself Thai, is very good and you won't be disappointed. I brought the book and CD's. I haven't tried the CD's yet, so can't comment.

Forgot to say. I watched someone use Rosetta stone, it was the Spanish one. My opinion is, it look a complete waste of money. He was saying the words correct and it kept saying he was wrong. I would hate to think what it's like with Thai......as it's a tonal language.

Thanks, fellas.

I'm in Thailand at the moment and assuming I can seek it out in Bangkok. Will also see if I can pick up a few Primary School reading books - the kind that are used to teach Thai youngsters with.

[dean999]

A book called "Teach yourself Thai" by David Smyth

Is about the best all round book i have found.

Covers Thai script and language.

A book called "Teach yourself Thai" by David Smyth

Is about the best all round book i have found.

Covers Thai script and language.

Totally agree. I'm rubbish at learning from a book, but even i can understand and follow it.

I find with the book, it teaches you Thai you will use. For-instance, i brought linguaphone and once you get past the first section, it was rubbish. The first section was meeting people and intruducing yourself. After that it was teaching you colors and time ect. That sort of thing could be learn't later, it's not very important. Well, unless you work in Thailand.

Teach yourself Thai, is very good and you won't be disappointed. I brought the book and CD's. I haven't tried the CD's yet, so can't comment.

Forgot to say. I watched someone use Rosetta stone, it was the Spanish one. My opinion is, it look a complete waste of money. He was saying the words correct and it kept saying he was wrong. I would hate to think what it's like with Thai......as it's a tonal language.

Thanks, fellas.

I'm in Thailand at the moment and assuming I can seek it out in Bangkok. Will also see if I can pick up a few Primary School reading books - the kind that are used to teach Thai youngsters with.

I got my Teach yourself Thai off Amazon. Its not very expensive. Amazon

[Rumblecat]

Quicker just to get it from the shops though. Kinokuniya in Paragon stocks- both the version with or without the CD. Worth getting the one with the CD as it does help with the pronunciation.

[kriswillems]

I've tried Rosetta stone when I began to learn Thai.

I found it totally useless.

I uses the Thai script without explaining anything about the writing system.

It will teach you only a few fixed sentence construction (for lot of of money).

You will learn very little spoken Thai from it.

David Smyth's book (teach yourself Thai) is the best book I've ever seen for beginners, but the phonetic script in older versions of the book is very strange (maybe it's updated in newer versions?). The book gradually introduces the script and grammar, and the dialogues in each lesson are in normal spoken Thai. It's a study book, not a reference book. I think that for the beginning student David Smyth's book is even better in quality than the Benjawan Poomsam Becker books, but the books of Benjawan are more complete and easier to use as a reference book.

[jay1980]

I have found Rosetta stone useful for learning vocab (spoken only) and getting me listening to thai while in the UK without having to think too much.

It did not cost me a lot of money, just 200 baht in Pantip

I would do the course if you are getting the discs for free anyway, and read the suggested book too.

[Daewoo]

I have used a combination of different methods to learn Thai, and am now at a level where I can have a short conversation in broken Thai as long as the other person speaks good English

I continue to go back to Rosetta Stone, as I think it is good at teaching you how to form proper sentences (tense or structure), listening to and practicing proper tones, and learning adjectives etc... but not so good unless you want your conversation to consist of 'The boy is on the table' and 'the girls are jumpin'... You need to print out the PDF course notes in Thai and English, so you know exactly what the words and pictures mean (are the girls jumping or running? is it a girl and a woman or a girl and a man?)... I found it especially good for practicing comprehension, and quite enjoyable to do, as opposed to learning from a book...

I also used Thai for Beginners by Benjawan Poomsan Becker which is good for learning the letters and tones, so that you can then read the Thai script in Rosetta Stone...

Then you can get Thai for Intermediate Learners but be careful you don't accidentaly pick up Thai for Lovers which has a simillar coloured cover, but is much harder to explain to your farrang wife...

Cheers,

Daewoo

[LarryBird]

To me, Rosetta stone doesn't make sense for Thai, but it does for something like French/English. Rosetta stone uses the same format for each language.. It spends a lot of time on tenses, which really aren't at the center of Thai, but you can see it's importance in English or French, etc..

[rafval]

I would recommend worldwordexchange.com. Its a well set up site for learning with a Thai speaker and is relatively inexpensive. Its just starting so I'm sure any feedback would be appreciated by the owner.

[Suradit69]

To me, Rosetta stone doesn't make sense for Thai, but it does for something like French/English. Rosetta stone uses the same format for each language.. It spends a lot of time on tenses, which really aren't at the center of Thai, but you can see it's importance in English or French, etc..

I agree that it is not very useful to someone who is a complete novice, but now that I've (barely) emerged from that category I find it useful for listening/reading exercises.

For learning the alphabet and sounding out words, the one thing that worked best for me was "Read Thai in a Day." http://www.learnthaionline.com/

It really does seem to be better, at least for some people, to learn the alphabet and start building your vocabulary reading words actually in Thai rather than using some transliteration into English first. For one thing, writing a Thai word in English can lead to different pronunciations if you're American, English, Australian, Irish and so on.

Once again after you made some progress, Rosetta Stone can be a useful tool for practice ... although sometimes I need to have a Thai friend listen to or read some things that pop up because I can't figure out what the distinction is between the choices offered.

[lolex]

I've tried Smythe TYT and Becker and had lessons at Berlitz in BKK.All helped. I'm now using WWW.learn-thai-podcast.com/ which I highly recommend

[ChaiLor]

The David Smyth book is good, but as mentioned already the romanization of the Thai script into English can be very misleading, you'll read the Thai word as translated into English letters (obviously if the learner doesn't read Thai this is needed until they learn to read) and you will end up saying a very different word due to the romanisazation used, unfortunately there is no one standard system of romanization which means one Thai word can be spelt in English in a number of different ways, in my opinion (and some others) the romanization used by David Smyth probably looks least like how to pronounce the Thai word than any of the other systems of romanization. It's ok if you have someone like a teacher to tell you the correct pronunciation of the word or you listen to the cd's while your reading the book.

There's loads of great websites out there for learning Thai (just google it) and there's loads of great you tube videos and channels you can subscribe to (free) for learning Thai - if you have an iPhone or iPad there are loads of really great learn Thai apps as well!

One piece of advice - learn the alphabet and learn to read early, it's not as hard as you think, and really if you want to learn Thai (even just for speaking) I doubt anyone can really move much further than absolute beginner unless they can read, don't listen to people who say they can speak Thai great but can't read (they don't even know what they don't know). I'm no expert and I've got loads to learn myself, I'm only at about upper intermediate level. Good luck with your learning!

[lolex]

I've tried Smythe TYT and Becker and had lessons at Berlitz in BKK.All helped. I'm now using WWW.learn-thai-podcast.com/ which I highly recommend