Best way to become functional in the Thais language

[Johpa]

just want to give my input on proper thai.

Watch those videos of farang with amazing thai on thai social media. They almost all speak with an issaan accent. fck those damn R's

I find it amazing that you could detect an Isaan accent underneath the very heavy Farang accent. Throughout Thailand, regardless of the local Tai language spoken, in informal conversation the /r/ is often reduced and is detectable more in the articulation of the vowel than in the consonant itself.

[CaptHaddock]

Makio67,

The essential ingredients in learning Thai, or any language for that matter, are motivation and instruction from a qualified teacher. Most of the posters here are not and will never be fluent in Thai because they lack one or both of those essential tools. Therefore, their amateurish advice amounts to recommending various ways to fail.

If you are indeed motivated and ready to work hard for a long time, you should study at one of the only two schools in Bangkok that provide instruction at a level of quality comparable to the of a university in the US or Europe: the Intensive Thai Program at Chulalongkorn U. or Sumaa Institute at sumaa.net. There is a long list of ambassadors, embassy staff, foreign professors who have become proficient in Thai from studying in one of these programs. By comparison, no one succeeds at the home grown methods so popular at ThaiVisa like teaching yourself Thai from books and videos. That method is guaranteed to fail.

After you have learned Thai up to a certain level immersion in a Thai-only environment would help you a lot, but at the beginning, unless that Thai family includes qualified teachers of Thai for foreigners, you'll just get frustrated.

The Foreign Service Institute of the US State Dept which has been training diplomats in foreign languages for a long time has rated those languages by how difficult to learn they are for a native English speaker. Thai comes out just below the most difficult languages of all, which include Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Arabic. So, Thai is definitely not a walk in the park and it should not be surprising that the casual learners here on ThaiVisa nearly all fail.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Difficulty_for_English_Speakers

There is no royal road to Thai, but if you are willing to do the work you can succeed. If you do make the effort you may find that, in the end, Thai is fun.

[ourmanflint]

2 pages of "advice" and its obvious why some people struggle to learn Thai, only a single post with good advice that was drowned out by the rest.

Ask yourself this, how did I learn my own language? And then do the same.

If you can learn the Thai alphabet from beginning to end and pronounce all the sounds of each letter, you can learn Thai as well or probably better than anyone else here. Do not try to learn Thai by conversation alone, it does not work for some people who inflect as they talk, ( I'm talking from experience here). You need to break those words down first so you understand what you're saying properly.

So..

Learn the alphabet, use a free app on your phone, it will help you pronounce the sounds and recognize the letters.

Learn to write Thai - once you have started learning the alphabet, this is the next step, get a book, that also teaches reading writing Thai.

This is how you probably learned to speak your own language, and it really does work quite well.

Edited August 22, 2015 by ourmanflint

[aboctok]

I'm a Brit and my fellow Englishmen (typically from North England) seem incapable of saying 'baht' which should be like 'bart' instead they insist of saying 'bat'

By the way, using an "r" to indicate a long vowel bugs the bejesus out of me.

I works great for you, seancbk, or anyone else from England or Australia, because y'all don't pronounce that "r". But I pronounce syllable-final "r", along with anyone from Ireland, Scotland, Canada, the U.S., etc.

Lots of Thai folks like to use "r" in transliteration to indicate a long vowel sound, so you end up with American saying "Thong LoR" for the train station, pronouncing a big fat R at the end instead of making it sound just like the English word "law" (as in 'attorney at law').

Writing the "r" for the long vowel only works if you speak an English dialect that doesn't pronounce syllable-final r.

We seem to be talking about hard and soft r. If we were to delete that terminal r, you would hear me produce something completely different again, perhaps unintelligible. So, obviously, we do clearly pronounce the r. Informing us that we do not, simply because it is not a hard r, is more than a little ethnocentric, and might, in turn, bug the bejesus out of many.

[Walter Travolta]

Seems like the OP is so desperate to learn, he is trying to run before he can walk. Sometimes learning is done at a steady pace. IE) learning in blocks and making sure 1st part is learned before moving on to the next part instead of immersing yourself into 10 hours of learning a day hence waking up the next day and forgetting everything you tried to take on board the previous day!

Some people can learn this way and others need to take more time, the OP looks like he wants to do it as quickly as possible when maybe the way he learns is the tortoise and the hare route (him being the tortoise).

Throwing 15.000 baht at something doesnt mean it will happen any quicker, neither will offering more cash

[streboris]

I asked some Thai friends to pronounce the film title "Thor". I remind them when they laugh at my Thai. 5555

Thor is actualy pronounced T-hor (like tor) not Th-or....

[streboris]

Learning anything needs motivation that comes from personal interest. You have to want to learn, to get through the monotony.

People aren't naturals at anything. They are just more passionate about the things they excel at.

You can't learn anything by Osmosis. Everything takes hard work. If you really want something then it doesn't feel so much like hard work. If you're not really that interested then the tedium will beat you.

[Gecko123]

Homestay???

Are you going to just show up with your sleeping bag?

After day one the teenagers will all be sleeping over at their friends houses, toddlers and elementary school kids will run away hysterically laughing every time you try to talk to them, the husband will be staying out with his buddies until two in the morning to avoid you, the wife will barricade herself in the bedroom the second she's finished washing the dinner dishes, and all you'll be left with for company will be the granny who will probably mistake you for her dearly departed husband returned from the dead. Sorry, but I just can't imagine a Thai family being able to accommodate a grown man as an extended stay house guest -- just way too intrusive. Most Thais treat their homes like inner sanctums where you are lucky to get past the front room. Sounds like a terrible idea to me.

To answer your question, the best way to learn the Thai language is to roll up your sleeves and learn how to read, write and pronounce the alphabet.

Edited September 2, 2015 by Gecko123