Learn to read Thai in six days (workshop: Dec 14-19, Chiang Mai)

[RapidMethod]

Contrary to what you'd expect, reading Thai is the most efficient way to learn to speak and understand Thai clearly, without that strange 'farang' dialect that makes us sound like sick opera singers.

When you can read, you can also pick up Thai continuously and independently by paying attention to the street signs, menus and notices. No more stuffy classrooms or dusty text books.

This intensive six-day Learn to Read Thai bootcamp is remarkable because no memorization required. The Rapid Method is a visual and non-linguistic approach to learning Thai.

By the end of the week you will be able to recognize just about any Thai word and sound it out accurately with the correct tone.

Note: You won't necessarily understand what you are reading. That comes later. However, just because it seems unnecessary for learning to speak Thai, learning to read first is a kind of detour to get the "Super Highway" of conversational Thai. The conventional approach of learning to speak Thai using phonetic transliteration and careful listening is windy and arduous, which is why most people give up after a few months of trying.

Come to the workshop and get it done and dusted in one go!

Click here for more details and to book,

[oxo1947]

After over 16 years living full time here & many years of visiting, my Thai language is dreadful.........I sometimes think I am going backwards from what I knew in the 90s.

I wondered about the reading first method---but you can hold a limited conversation with a child, before they have even gone to school & learnt to read. So why should that come first for us.?

[bearpolar]

it just works

LEarn to read or end up frustrated and blaming thais for your failure like many do

[RapidMethod]

you can hold a limited conversation with a child, before they have even gone to school & learnt to read. So why should that come first for us.?

Oxo, children learn very differently - they go through a phase of mimicking everything they hear without any understanding. What they seem to be doing is training their muscles to produce the sounds. You'll be surprised at how much strength, energy and dexterity goes into saying something like "stop" or "gears". (The "t" is quite explosive, the "p" is spat out very abruptly, the "g" requires a lot of force from your throat and glottal muscles and the final "s" is a very sophisticated and difficult to execute "zzzz". We do all this easily and automatically.)

So as adults, we tend not to have this amazing muscle memory and fine motor control for alien sounds usually found in a foreign language. It's something we need to train for.

Unfortunately, if you try to learn these sounds and then try to produce them, we fall back on the sounds from our native language. We don't even hear the alien sounds because we kind of replay them internally and convert them into familiar sounds in the process. To add to the difficulty, there is no standard, accurate way to represent the Thai sounds phonetically using English letters [unless perhaps you learn the International Phonetic Alphabet first].

So the Thai we end up speaking is a kind of blunt, garbled version of Thai - like a Singaporean or (worse) Chinese person speaking English. No matter how fluent you might be, you just sound wrong - and it takes a native person quite some time to attune her or his ear to your way of speaking. (If you're not Scottish, for instance, it's almost impossible to understand a Scotsman speaking English. And people from the Midlands say "her" for "hair" and "poop" for "pup", etc....)

Finally, as adults, we learn strategically. Rote memorization and brute-force repetition doesn't really work for us anymore. It might simply be because we don't spend 5-10 years working at it for 12 hours a day, day in and day out. We have better things to do. Remember, we take at least ten years to learn our own language. A 10-year old might be able to speak fluently, but he won't have all that much to say. You can't really have a decent conversation with someone until they're at least 12 and usually not much before 14 or 15 years old.

I devised the Rapid Method as an attempt to address this problem. As adults, we learn very effectively if we can harness what we already know and can do it quickly (we have busy work and social lives, so very few of us are prepared to study arduously for hours at a time).

It doesn't take long to learn to read Thai. The way that it is traditionally taught is unnecessarily complicated. But the writing system is actually very logical and consistent (unlike English with "plan/plane/planet", "through/rough/bough", "finger/singer", "knight/gnat/knot", "no/not", "often/listen", etc. etc. etc.)

So once you've learnt to read Thai (and it's fairly easy if you use a visual, story and mnemonic approach), you have a framework that tells you precisely how to pronounce a Thai word. This means that you can start the process of correctly training your speaking muscles to speak accurately and fluently, it's just muscle training after all.

It also means that your brain somehow interprets the sounds you hear accurately. We seem to only hear what we expect to hear. When you listen 'aurally', you tend not to hear what people are saying, so you have to fill in the gaps and re-interpret the words and meanings. It all happens subconsciously and almost instantaneously.

When you can follow the text at the same time - and eventually this becomes a subconscious mental process (kind of like reading off a blackboard at the back of your head) - then you will find that you can hear what is being said crystal clear! It's remarkable.

This is all a kind of free bonus that comes as a side effect of being able to read Thai.

An equally important reason for learning to read is that you can pick up Thai directly from your environment, without having to go out of your way to attend a class or study a text book (with phonetic transliterations). I think this is why most people give up on Thai - it's too much of an effort and a waste of time.

But when you can read, you are learning all the time, just by being out and about and paying attention to the signs and notices and menus.

This drip-feed approach is an integral part of the Rapid Method. Learning a language is something you need to do continuously in your life but in small doses (I should call it the Hydroponic approach maybe).

As a wise Chinaman once said: "The best time to grow a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now."

[bearpolar]

took me 5-6 days to learn to read

tons of other people as well.. 2-3hrs per day

It's very simple once you try.

It's insane the amount of farangs who think speak good thais yet pronounce every single word wrongly because they cant read. Just the word Glap in Glap baan which is used daily

They all say Kap baan, กลับ is no where near kap. Always hear Ham Nam instead of haap nam, if you use your brain and learn to read อาบน้ำ you will finaly pronounce it correctly with the tone

list goes on and on.. The worst offender is all the different words that sound like khao.

[AyG]

took me 5-6 days to learn to read

tons of other people as well.. 2-3hrs per day

It's very simple once you try.

It's insane the amount of farangs who think speak good thais yet pronounce every single word wrongly because they cant read. Just the word Glap in Glap baan which is used daily

They all say Kap baan, กลับ is no where near kap. Always hear Ham Nam instead of haap nam, if you use your brain and learn to read อาบน้ำ you will finaly pronounce it correctly with the tone

list goes on and on.. The worst offender is all the different words that sound like khao.

(1) It's ridiculous to suggest that one can learn to read Thai in 5-6 days. After that amount of time, at best, one can decipher the characters. The language is so full of exceptions that it takes months if not years of practice to be able to read properly and to gain any sort of fluency.

(2) "กลับ is no where near kap". Really? The omission of the /l/ simply reflects that a large proportion of native Thai speakers don't pronounce the second consonant sound of leading consonant clusters. The pronunciation is reflecting the way that people actually speak, rather than some textbook definition of how words should be pronounced.

(3) "if you use your brain and learn to read อาบน้ำ you will finaly pronounce it correctly with the tone". However, if you rely upon the spelling you'll get the vowel length wrong. In this context น้ำ has a long vowel, so rather than as you wrote, "nam", it should be "naam".

[stoneyboy]

And this week snow is predicted in Bangkok.

[seedy]

One Troll / Flaming post removed

[Aforek]

Thai school books for Thai kids have hundreds of exercises to do, during several years ; it's a very complex language to read , " Being able to read means understanding the characters and being able to sound simple words", yes in 5-6 days you can have an idea of the language, but you have much more work to do every day ; for me, I think I was able to start to read after six months of hard work , and I was 26 years old, now it would be impossible

Learn to read English, how many days ? 3 - 4 days ?

[metisdead]

A post commenting on moderation has been removed.

[futsukayoi]

took me 5-6 days to learn to read

tons of other people as well.. 2-3hrs per day

It's very simple once you try.

It's insane the amount of farangs who think speak good thais yet pronounce every single word wrongly because they cant read. Just the word Glap in Glap baan which is used daily

They all say Kap baan, กลับ is no where near kap. Always hear Ham Nam instead of haap nam, if you use your brain and learn to read อาบน้ำ you will finaly pronounce it correctly with the tone

list goes on and on.. The worst offender is all the different words that sound like khao.

Like the post you were responding to I have a very different idea of what it means to read than can be accomplished in 10-15 hours. You can learn the Thai alphabet and to work out the tone rules in that time. With that you can struggle to slowly decrypt most Thai words. That is a long long way from reading quickly and without too much effort. There are also many words which are odd or irregular readings (especially those from Sanskrit / Pali) which ill still be a struggle.

While I agree with the importance of learning to read Thai to advance with the language I definitely do not think it is the best way to learn to pronounce correctly. Learning a word is written กลับ is zero help in pronouncing it correctly in Thai unless you have invested the effort to to master the sounds those symbols encode. The IPA version 'klap (sorry I can't type the tone mark) is in my vie much better for beginners trying to master proper pronunciation. For that putting a Little effort into learning the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is much better. An decent dictionary will have the IPA representation for words which are a precise guide to pronunciation. It will also be just as useful with any other languages you learn. It also has the advantage of being quite close to the official Thai way of transcribing into Roman letters.

[tgeezer]

I am with you Rapid Method, in as much as learning Thai cuts out the need to learn IPA. In กลับ >glup is just a reminder, you don't need IPA to cobble together a reminder, สามารถ> saamaad you need it once only.

The lack of IPA in the Thai population mentioned by one of your students, is reason enough not to learn it, because the ability to discuss spelling with people you meet is invaluable and the earlier one starts learning to do that, the better.

[fireplay]

This looks great how often do you do the seminars...30k bht for a 6 day intensive wowwow does it come with an ed visa?

[jacky54]

To be fair the ad for this does not claim just how many words you will be able to read, about 12 I would think

[jacky54]

took me 5-6 days to learn to read

tons of other people as well.. 2-3hrs per day

It's very simple once you try.

It's insane the amount of farangs who think speak good thais yet pronounce every single word wrongly because they cant read. Just the word Glap in Glap baan which is used daily

They all say Kap baan, กลับ is no where near kap. Always hear Ham Nam instead of haap nam, if you use your brain and learn to read อาบน้ำ you will finaly pronounce it correctly with the tone

list goes on and on.. The worst offender is all the different words that sound like khao.

I don't say kap baan,I say glap baan, and I barely speak the primitive language, ham nam, or you kidding? Life is too short to waste time learning to read a load of squiggles.

[puukao]

"reading" might just mean a few words, clearly not fluent. I think RR is great, and, my 2 cents (if allowed), is to try to learn via youtube, books, etc.....and if you just can't get it, then definitely do RR. RR is 30,000 baht plus, and you can try a few books for 1,000 baht. I learned to read via other books, but had a friend take RR and really loved it. the peeing character is the best.........

[bearpolar]

I am with you Rapid Method, in as much as learning Thai cuts out the need to learn IPA. In กลับ >glup is just a reminder, you don't need IPA to cobble together a reminder, สามารถ> saamaad you need it once only.

The lack of IPA in the Thai population mentioned by one of your students, is reason enough not to learn it, because the ability to discuss spelling with people you meet is invaluable and the earlier one starts learning to do that, the better.

ไม้หันอากาศ makes it glap not u ลั 'la'

ถ is t/th as ending consonant but i guess depending on your nationality you could be sounding your D's as T

[tgeezer]

I am with you Rapid Method, in as much as learning Thai cuts out the need to learn IPA. In กลับ >glup is just a reminder, you don't need IPA to cobble together a reminder, สามารถ> saamaad you need it once only.

The lack of IPA in the Thai population mentioned by one of your students, is reason enough not to learn it, because the ability to discuss spelling with people you meet is invaluable and the earlier one starts learning to do that, the better.

ไม้หันอากาศ makes it glap not u ลั 'la'

ถ is t/th as ending consonant but i guess depending on your nationality you could be sounding your D's as T

This proves my point doesn't it? How would I know I didn't t learn the system.

The nine endings (ตัวสะกด*)are กา กก กด กบ กง กน กม เกย เกอว if you want to represent ด as t it's alright but don't try to make rules about it, mostly they are hardly noticeable. Similarly อั sounds more like u when I say it.

* edited สกด

While I am at it; the most difficult thing for Thais is to add endings in English, they don't like "say inga" "hou sa" "poin ta" and we don't know we are saying it . Thai certainly doesn't have an ending 'tha' or "ta".

[AyG]

ไม้หันอากาศ makes it glap not u ลั 'la'

This highlights the problems with using informal systems of transcription. Some people (and some authors) use "u" for this sound. Most of them tend to be Australians (at least that's my impression). Clearly there's nothing wrong with doing so. If using "u" works in your particular accent, sobeit. It really wouldn't matter if you used x, ↂ or ƾ if that worked for you. (That said, in my opinion it's far better to learn a formal system such as that of Mary Haas.)

Incidentally, the IPA representation of the Thai vowel sound is /a/. This sound does not occur in standard English as a short vowel.

/a/ is an open, back, unrounded vowel.

/æ/ is a near-open, front, unrounded vowel.

/ʌ/ (as in "but", "cut") is an open, mid-back unrounded vowel.

From a purely phonetic point of view "u" is clearly a closer representation of the Thai vowel sound than "a".

[bearpolar]

I don't know who you hang with but sara a's and mai hanagat sound no where close to anything but variations of A in english or french

Have yet to meet a single thai who sounds those like u's.

The phonetic on thai-language.com and the sounding on wallen's free app should be enough for anyone to get pretty close to the real sound of every vowel

[AyG]

I don't know who you hang with but sara a's and mai hanagat sound no where close to anything but variations of A in english or french

Have yet to meet a single thai who sounds those like u's.

The phonetic on thai-language.com and the sounding on wallen's free app should be enough for anyone to get pretty close to the real sound of every vowel

It's difficult for people to hear the differences between sounds in foreign languages. People will assume that the sounds are the same as something similar in their own primary tongue. I assume that's your problem. However, the Thai sound is (as I wrote) an open, back, unrounded vowel. The English "a" as in "cat" or "hat" is a near-open, front, unrounded vowel. In fact, the only thing the two vowels have in common is that they are both unrounded.

You are, however, right about French. It does have /a/ as a vowel sound, the same as in Thai.

[bearpolar]

At some point you have to realize that just like in every language, 80% of the population isnt close to speaking correctly

Most Thai's do not pronounce any sara A's differently, just longer or short

I'll ask my woman to read all of them and i will hear a difference in each of them but most other people i have asked have 0 difference. Just like most people i know in my country have terrible elocution on many many words.

Pronouncing every sara a's as the french a will get you understood. Again this is a workshop to learn how to read to get better at thai, not a class to get you to be better than 99% of thais and become as good as the people on radio/tv

[Johpa]

At some point you have to realize that just like in every language, 80% of the population isnt close to speaking correctly

If 80% of the people are pronouncing a word in a particular manner then by definition that is the correct manner to pronounce that word despite any outdated orthography.

Look, I think it's great to emphasize reading although I am skeptical any method can do much in only days. It usually takes far longer to memorize the tone rules and also far longer for most Indo-European speakers to parse unaspirated stop consonants, glottal stops, unrounded vowels, and the list goes on. I still meet Farangs who speak and read Thai but who pronounce the word for chicken as "gai" using a voiced consonant.

Also, the IPA system is great for linguists but far too complex for the casual learner. Other transliteration systems designed specifically for teaching Thai, such as the Haas system, are more efficient.

[CaptHaddock]

I taught myself the Thai writing system using Marvin Brown's AUA books in two months spending about an hour a day. Later in the Intensive Thai Program at Chulalongkorn I relearned the system in five weeks of Basic 2 (four hours per day plus homework), although we covered additional material as well. So, I think a flash course in 5 days is not going to work for most people because it is going to present too much material too quickly. Some people might get over the hump and finish learning the writing system afterward. Crash courses for second language acquisition, like miracle weight-loss diets, seldom work.

Unless you are an ethnolinguist doing field work in some obscure language, it hard to imagine a bigger waste of time than learning IPA.

[tgeezer]

I agree on IPA for learners of only one language. My experience leeds me to think that although there may be variations in some aspects of producing Thai there is little variation in tones of individual words. For this I wish that I had had a nagging Thai from the outset. My caddy fills this role when I am on the course and I find that I have been lazy on tones; it takes only one verbal correction to set the meaning of a word, for example, I said ไมสาม only once, now I can say only ไม้สาม

[Richard W]

However, if you rely upon the spelling you'll get the vowel length wrong. In this context น้ำ has a long vowel, so rather than as you wrote, "nam", it should be "naam".

I got the impression that อาบน้ำ started with a short vowel, at least when the need for a shower was deemed urgent.

This highlights the problems with using informal systems of transcription. Some people (and some authors) use "u" for this sound. Most of them tend to be Australians (at least that's my impression). Clearly there's nothing wrong with doing so. If using "u" works in your particular accent, sobeit. It really wouldn't matter if you used x, ↂ or ƾ if that worked for you. (That said, in my opinion it's far better to learn a formal system such as that of Mary Haas.)

Incidentally, the IPA representation of the Thai vowel sound is /a/. This sound does not occur in standard English as a short vowel.

/a/ is an open, back, unrounded vowel.

/æ/ is a near-open, front, unrounded vowel.

/ʌ/ (as in "but", "cut") is an open, mid-back unrounded vowel.

From a purely phonetic point of view "u" is clearly a closer representation of the Thai vowel sound than "a".

Your description reveals a problem with the phonemic use of IPA - a great deal of flexibility is allowed in the choice of symbol, including permission to use ASCII characters in preference to the purely specialist phonetic characters. For example:

[a] is an open, front unrounded vowel.

[ɑ] is an open, back unrounded vowel.

[ʌ] is an open-mid, back unrounded vowel.

[ɐ] is a near-open, central unrounded vowel.

[ɜ] is an open-mid central unrounded vowel, as in the "but", "cut" of southern England.

Confusingly, /ɜː/ is the traditional notation for the southern English vowel of "nurse".

To my ear, the vowel represented by mai han akat is close to [ɐ] and [ɜ]. I usually hear it as the vowel of STRUT, but sometimes as the vowel of HAT. While the vowel of HAT is normally represented as /æ/, in southern England it is presently closer to [a] than to [æ].

One problem with IPA is that there isn't a simple symbol for the vowel sound mid-way between [a] and [ɑ], which is probably where the vowel of บาท 'baht' sits. I usually here it as [ɑ], sometimes as [a]; my brain doesn't register [ɐ].

I still meet Farangs who speak and read Thai but who pronounce the word for chicken as "gai" using a voiced consonant.

Also, the IPA system is great for linguists but far too complex for the casual learner. Other transliteration systems designed specifically for teaching Thai, such as the Haas system, are more efficient.

Doesn't mispronouncing ko kai as /ɡ/ increase clarity? It won't be mistaken for /kʰ/.

But the Haas system basically uses IPA! One liberty taken was to use /ɛ/ rather than /æ/. This was done because with doubling being used for vowel length, /ææ/ would have been just too uɡly.

[bearpolar]

It's funny, all of you into these advanced phonetic studies and yet every single thai agrees that chicken does not sound anywhere near K and sound exactly as a G. That's probably why translators have used K instead of G on all signs in phuket when it sounds like G

Kata is actually Gata, Karon is actually Garon, phuket is phuget or even Koh which is actually Gaw

There isnt a single thai on tv pronounce go gai as Ko kai as that is a completely different word

There isnt a single thai teacher pronouncing go gai as Ko Kai as that is a completely different word

There isnt a sinlge low or high class thai pronouncing go gai as ko kai as that is a completely different word

But tons of fancy internet students are trying to push their K and KH agenda. I don't know whos paying all of you to try to make everyone mispronounce every G in the thai language but he seems to be succeeding.

all you're doing is teaching people to ask about eggs instead of chicken and to never be able to discuss a chicken. IDK what the IPA says. Every single person using G will pronounce the word correctly.

[Johpa]

Double post deleted

[Johpa]

It's funny, all of you into these advanced phonetic studies and yet every single thai agrees that chicken does not sound anywhere near K and sound exactly as a G. That's probably why translators have used K instead of G on all signs in phuket when it sounds like G.

Yes, Thais tend to hear the /g/ sound as the /k/ sound in "kai" because there is no "g" in Thai, it is not phonemic in Thai. And the unaspirated /k/ in "kai" is not phonemic in English and thus is also parsed as a /g/ by English speakers. But if you haven't reached the point in your mastery of Thai where you can't hear the difference, and with your seemingly limited knowledge regarding phonetics, well I doubt your ability to teach Thai.

(Sorry for the interrupted double post)

[bearpolar]

As long as 100% thais pronounce go gai as a clear G and understand go gai as a G sound perfectly i will stick to the sound that is understood by thai instead of confusing them by trying to be fancy and using K for a G sounding letter thus having them guess what the hell im trying to mean because im mispronouncing every single word with go gai.

It's a few of you vs 55millions others.