Getting A Grip On This Roller Coaster Language

[jamiesensei]

Hi,

Thought some of you might find this idea rather fun. It seems to work quite well for me so far. I continue to struggle with tones in this language and have decided I really want to concentrate on them to see if I can improve the general comprehension of my Thai.

I am working with the text from the translation of "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" which I have the Thai edition of and an English edition. Have recorded someone reading the text sentence by sentence in Thai and have embedded these sound files as well as the Thai text in Anki Flash cards to repeat to me again and again. I have the 'record you voice' plug in in Anki and I can record my voice and compare it with the Thai version.

I am quite excited about my use of colours to indicate the tone of each syllable. I find that this really helps me with the tones more than trying to using a lower script h or l or whatever. In Anki it is fairly easy to add colours to text. So a typical sentence looks like this :

ถึงหน้าปกมันจะเขียนไว้ว่าอย่างนั้นก็เถอะ

The colours really seem to help. Black is mid tone, green is low, orange is falling, red is high tone and blue is rising. I think it is a nice intermediate step between using roman letters with accents and Thai letters with no indication of tone. I think the colours are much more immediate and evocative than accents or any other system could be.

I have found if I try to read the words while trying to work out what each tone the word is this is just to much strain on me at this stage and the words really are not going to flow in a natural manner or I am probably going to end up ignoring the tones or getting them wrong.

I tried to share the anki deck I have so far with ten or so sentences in it, the first page of Diary of A Wimpy Kid for every ones enjoyment but unfortunately I am having difficult with getting the sound files to work in a shared deck. I may have another go at this another time.

Jamie

[ayayay]

the colors is a great idea! Looking forward to see more of this

Edited May 6, 2012 by ayayay