Review of systems and tools in 2024 for learning and translating thai

[poseidon5566]

The best thread on here is xylanics also known as a AJ. However, 12 years is a long time. 

I have used many resource's I will start with the best. Learn Thai the rapid method, I now understand the Thai alphabet and can read most individual words I did brute force and rush through the course focusing only on reading i am now going back over things and trying to make the meaning of words stick it can get very frustrating especially when the helpful tutorial videos end but stick with it a combination of youtube and hunting books for clues got me through most of what i got stuck on i then finished it with a few hours private tution with there tutor erin. 

Preply: having cracked reading i hired a private tutor on preply there are LOTS! of tutors and price anywhere from single digits to 20 pounds an hour you will need to sort through them and see who works for you. I'm not sure I'm sticking with my current Thai tutor and wont name him here im also doing this after learning to read and am currently reading dan brown's inferno translated into thai with him.

Chat GPT4o this is there newest language model access to it costs me £20.00 a month. My tutor has told me it has accurately translated the written thai from dan browns book with 100% accuracy it has also put spaces between the individual thai words with a 100% accuracy. this has solved three major problems which is going to rapidly speed up my learning and make travelling the country and talking to girls wonderful. 

One, I can break down any Thai text into individual words for practice. This is essential for self practicing reading and will save a fortune in private tuition hours, 

2. i can use it to translate textbooks. by copying and pasting Thai into it I can effectively translate questions into English from thai text books allowing me to learn Thai from thai books aimed at teaching Thai children how to read and write 

3. I can get local Thais to type what they want to say into the programme and read it. and respond in English and get a very accurate translation into thai allowing me to talk to girls on my travels. like wise i can also use it to translate WORD FOR WORD those phrase books and build my vocabulary. 

Will add more later. please add to this list as much as possible       

[MarcusS]

You put a lot of effort into learning the written language. If your goal is to master reading and writing, then fine. 

However, if your goal is to be able to speak and understand spoken thai, not to say speak thai fluently, then this approach is not a good one.

Why?

1. Reading thai is very challenging, as there is no punctiation or even spaces between the words. 

2. Thai words are often pronounced differently than how they are written.

3. The style and wording can be very different from spoken thai.

If your goal is to speak well, you would save yourself a lot, a lot of effort by choosing another path. 

This path would involve: 

1. Considerable effort on practicing pronounciation until you get the letters and tones right. If not, you would have do de-learn and re-learn this later. 

2. Use of high-quality resources with audio tapes of spoken thai, accompanied by their transliteration into Paiboon+, using the English alphabet and four special characters, tone markup and marking on which syllables to stress. 

3. Several high-quality grammar books.

4. An online or onsite teacher. 

5. A structured approach with repetition being a main ingredient.

This approach had me speak with relative ease after six months of effort in my spare time, and being relatively fluent (there are more precise ways to describe your level) in two years. 

I could elaborate and name resources, but please tell me first if being able to speak and understand spoken thai is among your goals,@poseidon5566

.

Edited May 20 by MarcusS

[poseidon5566]

On 20/05/2024 at 06:00, MarcusS said:

 

I could elaborate and name resources, but please tell me first if being able to speak and understand spoken thai is among your goals,@poseidon5566

.

I wish to be fluent. I can read Thai i want to develop that ability, speaking the language is the ultimate goal. i now won't be able to travel again till next year because of university placement all thoroughout the summer so will spend the next 12 months building it. 

Surely like children i need to build my reading ability by practicing, much like we did in school till we go to the point of sight reading and understanding as we are no longer sounding out the word no?    

[Luv2Phuket]

Following with interest, although I want/need to build my speaking/understanding vocabulary more than my reading ability.

I can parrot something back, but have completely forgotten it 2 minutes later, which drives my TGF nuts.

[particle]

On 20/05/2024 at 06:00, MarcusS said:

However, if your goal is to be able to speak and understand spoken thai, not to say speak thai fluently, then this approach is not a good one.

 

 

 

If you just want to ask the bargirls how many kids they have then yes, but if your aim is to learn to speak Thai with reasonable proficiency then I disagree.

• The conventional wisdom is that it is important to learn to at least read Thai and I agree, learning reasonable pronunciation is impossible otherwise.
• There is no standard transliteration, so trying to pronounce vocabulary correctly from different sources is impossible.
• If you hear a new word, you often need to  ask how to spell it, the person speaking it may have an accent.
•  Not being able to read is a handicap, same as it would be in your own language.
• If you can read a word in Thai then you know how to pronounce it with few exceptions.
• Reading Thai is harder than many other languages, but totally doable over a few weeks.

 

 

[particle]

15 minutes ago, Luv2Phuket said:

Following with interest, although I want/need to build my speaking/understanding vocabulary more than my reading ability.

I can parrot something back, but have completely forgotten it 2 minutes later, which drives my TGF nuts.

You need flashcards, I think Anki are the standard (I'm currently programming my own so I haven't tried Anki).

If you're serious about Thai I'd recommend learning to read fairly early in your learning journey (which I didn't....) otherwise you end up with large vocabulary that you visualise in English with no idea of the correct tone or accurate pronunciation.

 

[poseidon5566]

I have decided to end teaching with the preply tutor and focus efforts with erin from learn thai the rapid method. Erin is native English and has lived in Thailand since 10 years old and is fluent with both languages.

 

Youtube

Ok. I have used this along the way to help fill in blanks when learning to read and practice pronunciation. The following channels have been quite helpful for different reasons. 

1. I get thais (Brian Flowers is a member of this)

2.   THAI Growth Expert - Easy to Learn with Kru Arty

The second one he reads the Mane Mana books which if you can read Thai lets you practice your reading. 

Most of the YouTube channels especially the more popular ones like bana thai are completely useless they rush through everything don't really explain anything and then its buy my course ad nauseum. No. if you can't teach in a YouTube video to promo your programme what am I paying you for, teaching will be garbage.

Learn thai pod cast. i started with this its painfully slow and i found progress lacking. I now file it under outdated and not worth i also question the translations. you can find a lot of their material on YouTube before paying. 

   

[poseidon5566]

17 minutes ago, particle said:

You need flashcards, I think Anki are the standard (I'm currently programming my own so I haven't tried Anki).

If you're serious about Thai I'd recommend learning to read fairly early in your learning journey (which I didn't....) otherwise you end up with large vocabulary that you visualise in English with no idea of the correct tone or accurate pronunciation.

 

I wasted so much time before i could read the alphabet and words. I now use the transliteration to purely check i am reading the word correctly, i am picking up words on say the gogo advertisements for example. Words are starting to stick and I can use a VERY large range of resources to learn being able to copy and paste to chat gpt for word spacing from say a newspaper is a game changer and i'm starting to pick up patterns. So I STRONGLY recommend learning to read to learn to speak first like your self does. I have ADD so if I can do it anyone can. took me 2 months. 

I want to be able to have real conversations and follow proper topics like say the news.       

[Bonkabit]

Learn Thai with Mod 

From:[email protected]

 

 

สวัสดีค่ะ Sawatdii ka!

I hope you are doing well. It has been a few months since my last email, I hope you are still keeping up with your Thai learning. 

If you need help in learning Thai, I am always here to be your teacher. My team offers both online private lessons and online group classes on Zoom. I'm happy to let you know that I have just opened new private group classes for beginners, it is a small group so you will get attention from the teacher similarly to learning one-on-one. 

You can find the class syllabus here.

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 Engaging, fun and active learning sessions

 Small group class with a friendly atmosphere

If you are interested to leanr Thai with my team, please contact me at [email protected]

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There are many ways to say "please" in Thai, it depends on what you would like to do such as making a request, making a suggestion, begging etc. In this lesson, you will learn an easy way to say "please" in Thai when you want to make a suggestion i.e. please come, please stop by, please let me know etc. 

Click here to watch the video.

 

Feel free to let me know what you would like to learn next.

 

Kind regards,

Mod

Unsubscribe here

 

 

---

[direct_voyage]

@poseidon5566 from the sound of it you are happy with your investment in The Rapid Method?  This program caught my eye, but I won't start for a few more years once retired.  Following this thread closely, and the GPT4 is a good idea!

[MarcusS]

14 hours ago, poseidon5566 said:

I wish to be fluent.

I´ll put some effort, then, into trying to contribute to you achieving that goal. 

Congratulations that you´ve come this far in learning to read and write, it´s impressive. Of course it gives benefit, also when you goal is to be fluent.

Like you, I wanted to speak thai fluently, using the most effective way possible. And very importantly, enjoying myself. 

About my background: 

Before starting to learn Thai, I was fluent in English, Spanish, French and one of the three Scandinavian languages. I have lived and studied in Spain, Australia and France in addition to my home country and taken advanced university exams in all four languages. I also studied phonetics and linguistics, and I've worked as a language teacher. Thus, I have some background in languages and not least a passion for it. 

After starting to learn Thai, I spent a considerable amount of time reading up on the research on what are the most effective methods to learn a new language, and have also summarised those findings. 

This is an ultra-short overview of evidence-based methods to learn a language as effectively as possible: 

I'll come back to those methods later.

First of all, a teacher can be immensely helpful. I've had nearly ten teachers, and more than 600 lessons, all online. Most were found on iTalki.com. 

If you are able to take the active role in those lessons, then all the better. By active I mean that:

• you come to the lesson loaded with questions based on your efforts since last time
• you guide the teacher on what methods seems to work best for you
• you tell her to not move too fast, but help you to repeat what you've already learned
• you explore methods together

Not all teachers are open to this, and prefer a more traditional role. Not all students prefer to be in charge of the lessons either. 

Second, you need great material - written and recorded. I spent a lot of time exploring what is out there.

The overall best I've found is the excellent, fun and very useful stories, or dialogues, really, from pickup-thai.com. Each story comes as a recording of actors talking together, a Thai and a Paiboon transliteration of the dialogue, and for the first 60 stories or so, an English translation. There's also an explanation of some of the vocabulary. You´ll have to pay for this rich and powerful resource, but it's worth it. Three of the dialogues are free, so you can try them and see for yourself.

Third, you need excellent dictionaries. The two best dictionaries are available as apps, with these icons: 

The first is Thai-English Dictionary (TL) from thai-language.com. 

The second is Talking Thai - English Dictionary+Phrasebook. 

Both are comprehensive, and come with differerent strengths and limitations. Together, they fulfill most needs. 

Talking Thai uses the Paiboon+ transliteration language, telling you clearly the tones, and which syllable to stress. 

Fourth, you need grammar books. 

My three favorite grammar books, which I have read to pieces, are these three:

Let me end this first post with an example on how some of the concepts from the chart of methods, above, can be put into use. 

When you listen to a recording of spoken Thai, or read a transliteration or Thai version of a dialogue, you should attack it with several tools: 

1. Listen first, trying to understand, several times.

2. Go through the Thai/transliterated version of the dialogue, word by word, sentence by sentence. 

a. Make sure you thoroughly understand every element of the text. Look up the examples in the Thai-English dictionary. Repeating is of little use if you do not really understand. Save any questions you have for the next lesson with the teacher. 

b. Make sure you thoroughly understand the grammar of each sentence. Use the grammar books for that, and save any questions for the next lesson with the teacher. 

c. Use a recorder app and record yourself pronouncing the words, or expressions, or sentences you up until now would not be able to use in conversation. Then record a translation in your mother tongue. I´ve explored nearly all recorders in the AppStore, and this one is most suitable for the purpose:  

You can of course also write things down, or use spaced repetition apps such as Anki, but using your voice is faster. 

d. You´ll end up with lists of recordings. Use the title of the list (file) to add when you made the recording, and then the dates when you repeated. Repeat every day in the beginning, then with longer intervals, by listening to the translation in you mother tongue, then trying to recall, and pronounce, the word, expression or sentence. 

e. Before the lesson, send the teacher a list of which words etc. you would like her to help you use in the upcoming lesson. With open-minded teachers, we created silly stories using the words and expressions! Fun is such an important part of the journey. 

f. After the lesson, use "active recall": Write down or say out loud what you learned in the lesson, un-supported by notes. Then go through your notes. 

If you and/or others find this useful, I´ll continue posting. 

 

Edited May 24 by MarcusS

[MarcusS]

Pronounciation and tones

You have to get this right. If it's not a top priority from the moment you start practising Thai, you'll have a very hard time de-learning and re-learning later on, trying to change the way you've become used to talk. 

Why is this so important? The reason is that the tones in Thai carry semantic value. This means that the meaning of a word with the same letters, like "mai", depends on the tone you use when pronouncing the word. In Thai, there are five tones. Thus, "mai" can mean "no", "new", "right?" "microphone" and "silk". depending on the tone you use. To further complicate things, the vowel can be long or short, and you end up with additional meanings, such as "log" and "mile". 

In languages such as English, tones are generally used to convey feelings. 

Next, don't let transliterations ("karaoke") with English chararters for Thai letters fool you into believing that the Thai letters are pronounced the same way as in English. There are subtle differences for many of them and you'll need some tongue gymnastics in the beginning and utter sounds you find strange. Don't worry, you'll get used to them. 

So how do you get this right?

You need to both understand and practice. Here's a good place to get a good understanding: 

https://slice-of-thai.com/consonant-sounds/

https://slice-of-thai.com/vowel-sounds/

https://slice-of-thai.com/language/

When you understand the basics, practice is the thing. 

It takes a lot of effort to be good at this, and having a teacher help will not be enough. 

I spent more than half of a year practicing the tones and the pronouncation. Fortunately, I learned words at the same time. 

The key was this app, mentioned in my former post: 

The app gives you the possibility to save words in files, complete with a Thai, Paiboon+ transliteration, and recording at your fingertips.

I typically saved 50 words in each file. Click on the file, and you have a list of words in front of you. There is no memory card function, but my hack was to simply cover what I would try to remember by scrolling so that I could see only the transliteration. 

Once remembering the word, I would listen to the recording of the word and then repeat it, again and again and again, until I got the pronounciation and tone approximately right. As I said, it took half a year. 

The four vowels are particularly difficult. Up until this day, I have to pay particular attention to the difference between "o" and "ɔ" - and my TGFs childrens names are nearly identical except for this vowel...

One thing I've found useful is to exaggerate the tones and pronounciation as much as I can when practicing. The thing is that what is an exaggeration to me, is closer to the actual Thai pronounciation than what I think would sound more normal. 

 

Edited May 25 by MarcusS

[poseidon5566]

On 24/05/2024 at 02:57, direct_voyage said:

@poseidon5566 from the sound of it you are happy with your investment in The Rapid Method?  This program caught my eye, but I won't start for a few more years once retired.  Following this thread closely, and the GPT4 is a good idea!

Very satisfied. 2 months to learn how to read a foreign alphabet with completely different grammar RULES is good progress in my book. I do need to build a vocabulary now tho before I can break down sentences on my own without ai or human assistance. Both erin and my native Thai tutor have assured me there is no shortcuts, RULES or tricks to this and its how he had to learn growing up.    

[particle]

I first came to Thailand in 1992 when there was no Internet and no good printed resources that I could find and I didn't make much progress despite a lot of effort.

The breakthrough came when I found a book called 'Teach yourself Thai' by David Smyth which came with an audio cassette (it was a very long time ago!). I highly recommend this book.

Once I had that foundation I put some effort into learning vocabulary using physical flashcards, 10 words a day over a reasonable period, at that time a good resource for vocabulary was Benjawan Becker's books (also with cassettes), but  now there are many.

Since then, I've been able to have basic  conversations,  but I'm now able to spend winters in Thailand so I want to take what I've learned to the next level. It's purely for fun but I'd like to try not to sound like a complete idiot, so I'm making an effort with tones which I didn't do originally. 

Incidentally, people often say that tones are important for meaning and you won't be understood if you use the wrong one, but that's not true, at least in the tourist areas. I'm currently clueless about tones, but people usually understand me.

My plan for going to the next level was, in this order (Vocab in parallel):

1) Learn the alphabet properly and the tone RULES - I'd forgotten many of the letters and the tone RULES, also needed to learn modern font. I want to visualise words in Thai script, not English transliteration. Also learn the names of the letters so people can spell words for me. I've posted separately why reading is important, there's also a very good explanation in the introduction of the Smyth book. (My reading is now reasonable and was very definitely worth the effort).
2) Re-read the David Smyth book and learn properly anything I'm sketchy on.
3) Learn 10 words a day - find a good flashcard program
4) Find resources on the Internet for listening and reading practice
5) Decide on the best structured online course to follow.
6) Find a personal tutor online. I agree with @MarcusS - I will want the lessons tailored to what I need and will come with a list of questions.

So, some of the resources I like (which was actually the OPs question .......) 

Thai alphabet flashcards with pictures (downloadable)
https://slice-of-thai.com/flashcards/

I have a poster of the Thai alphabet with pictures that I hung on the wall to refer to before I'd memorised them, they used to sell it around the bars but I haven't seen it for a few years.

Modern font (lots of signs are in modern font which miss out the loops so very confusing at first)
https://thai-notes.com/notes/readingmodernfonts1.html

Banana Thai has a good video on modern fonts.

'Teach yourself Thai' by David Smyth . I can't recommend this book highly enough for taking someone from beginner to being able to read and write and have reasonable conversations. It's well structured and written in a very engaging style. You can buy it on Ebay quite cheaply without the audio, or you can probably download the pdf if you search for it, I have a pdf copy and mp3s of the audio, pm me if you want a copy. This book was used for the first year of Thai evening classes (no longer offered) at SOAS (London university).

It's been superceded by 'Complete Thai' by the same author and publisher, which is very similar to the original. The book is quite expensive, but you can read it free online at https://archive.org/details/completethai0000smyt/mode/2up , you need to register and login and then they let you read it for an hour, they say it's renewable every hour. The audio is available free on the publishers site and works really well, very easy to read and listen to the relevant audio. https://library.teachyourself.com/id004325066/Complete-Thai , you need to login with a free account.

Audio is essential for pronunciation for both of the above.

David Smyth has also written a grammar book mentioned by @MarcusS on this thread. Since I'm such a fan of his I ordered it online, but you can download it free at https://archive.org/details/thai-an-essential-grammar-by-david-smyth  (click the three dots near top left).

Flashcards really need to be able to play the Thai sound spoken by a native speaker. I looked around and I couldn't find anything that suited me exactly but I'm a software developer so I wrote my own so I can also link example usage to words if helpful.
However there is an excellent free Flashcards Chrome extension for Google Translate that does play the sound and allows you to categorise (tag) words. 
You save the words you want to learn in Google Translate (you can do it on your phone when your Thai friend teaches you a new word), then click on the flashcards icon. They seem to be currently improving it, they've recently added some options for the repetition algorithm. You can download all your saved words to a spreadsheet (without the sounds). Very highly recommended (if you don't want to write your own....) 
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/translate-flashcards/hpfoohijjdhhhbpmiocjoblocmfeallh?hl=en&pli=1

Audacity is a free program for PC that I use to record sounds, you can record directly from the PC sound card, I use it for recording from You Tube and Google Translate, you can export as a .wav etc., I then attach to my flashcards.

Chat GPT is astonishing and I'm sure will improve beyond recognition very, very quickly.
There are some You Tube videos that tell you how to use it for language learning, but I'm not sure it's quite ready to replace my plan. It does seem extremely good at generating vocab lists. 
You can now have an audio conversation with it which will be a game changer when it improves - currently the Thai speech sounds like an American with bad pronunciation, so for me unusable, but that will improve. 
I mentioned to it that I thought its pronunciation wasn't the best and I thought I detected a hint of sarcasm in its apology. Interestingly I was  using the female voice setting which was using Pom instead of Chun and Krup instead of Kaa, I did manage to get it to change after several attempts.

There's a You Tube video that tells you how to get it to download a list of vocab into a spreadsheet or even Anki format, but I haven't got it to do that yet.

There are some good teachers on You Tube with some really good videos, Mod, Pod101 and Banana have been mentioned in other posts, I really like Banana and would probably do her online course if it wasn't eye wateringly expensive. POD101 seems structured and affordable . Others are good for different things, Grace and New I particularly like, also Noey has some good listening videos.  Most of them also have structured courses and /or online live teaching.

Banana
https://www.youtube.com/@BananaThaiSchool

Noey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6Jy8INq7XU&list=PLP4lLM2dqILVmtZQtXGgYOy9Q7vQuN69a&index=1&t=5s

Grace
https://www.youtube.com/@thaiwithgrace9231/videos
Grace has an app for iPhone , but I'm Android so can't try it.

New
https://www.youtube.com/@thailessonsbynew

POD101
https://www.youtube.com/@ThaiPod101

Mod
https://www.youtube.com/@ThaiwithMod

Comprehensible Thai is a strange channel that promotes the idea that you can learn Thai by just listening like a child would, which is obviously complete bollocks unless you've got a very patient Thai parent .... It might work a bit better if they gave some visual cue as to what the words mean, but they don't. But quite fun for assessing how good your comprehension is or just immersing. I think Kru Home is a taxi driver in his alternate existence.
https://www.youtube.com/@ComprehensibleThai/videos

Other resources:
Active Thai - reading and writing, but I mainly used the Smyth book
https://www.activethai.com/

Learn with Oliver
Good for vocab, they can email you new words every day with usage, there's a trial period and then a free tier that doesn't include sound. Has good progress tests.
https://www.learnwitholiver.com/thai/

Italki seems to be the go-to for online tutoring, but I haven't yet tried it.

 

[particle]

On 24/05/2024 at 02:57, direct_voyage said:

@poseidon5566 from the sound of it you are happy with your investment in The Rapid Method?  This program caught my eye, but I won't start for a few more years once retired.  Following this thread closely, and the GPT4 is a good idea!

I find the references to ladyboys in hobnailed boots and chickens a bit creepy....

[bgtp]

On 23/05/2024 at 23:27, particle said:

If you just want to ask the bargirls how many kids they have then yes, but if your aim is to learn to speak Thai with reasonable proficiency then I disagree.

I’m with you. I learned my Thai by going to Thai language school in Bangkok for six months (5 days a week bar the numerous Thai holidays) over 20 years ago. Once we started to learn reading and writing everything about the language made much more sense and things really started to come together in my head. If I want to know a lady’s name I have her write it for me in Thai so I can pronounce it properly. A transliteration or transcription to Roman characters without tone marks isn’t gonna be helpful. I also think learning the reading has better helped me retain what I did learn all those years ago even if I’m not quite as good as I was back then since I’m just a tourist and don’t live there.

[MarcusS]

It's a nice and practical overview, @particle, and I wasn´t aware of all the resources you mention. If one is lucky enough to really enjoy learning Thai, there are endless possibilities to explore it. 

Learning and practicing in bed with a TG is one of the very best methods, in my opinion, – surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet😃 

It's actually true - I mean, if it´s a relaxed situation, with full, undivided attention from both, and with her lying on your arm a few inches from your head you´ll hear the pronounciation very well! Not to mention, that the breaks between lessons can be unfathomably more enjoyable than those at school haha. 

The Smyth books you mention take you to level B2, or "upper intermediate":

You can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible, without strain for either party.

The next level is C1 - "advanced":

You can express yourself fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions.

Both B2 and C1 have other criteria as well, I only mention what pertains to fluency when speaking. 

When people say they are "fluent", I always take it with a grain of salt, as what you mean by that can vary a lot from person to person. The definitions above are more specific. 

I guess your goal, @poseidon5566, would be B2 at first, and perhaps, later on, C1?

I'll mention a few systems, or principles, all known from research to speed up learning. 

 

Emotions

Whether working with a teacher, or on your own, use real emotions to help yourself remember. I guess many of us learning Thai will have forever imprinted in our brains certain expressions that had huge importance in particular situations where intense emotions were involved, be it romantic, sexual, or from a moment when you had an urgent need for something or were in big trouble. To me, the French word "inondation" (flood) comes to mind first – I once woke up in the middle of the night, with bandaged eyes, alone in a friend's apartment and when sitting up found that my feet were submerged in water. I then ran around in my underwear, knocking on the doors of other apartments looking for help, and well, learned the, to me, new word "indondation" in that process. A great way to learn vocabulary, indeed - forever connected to a feeling of despair!

Some suggestions on the use of emotions: 

• When learning on your own, try to relate what you learn to something in your life with deep personal meaning to you.
• When learning with a teacher, try to connect what you learn to something personal, and tell the teacher about it, in Thai. 
• If the teacher is open to telling you about her personal life as well, then all the better. I once had a teacher who in detail described the "chùk-lá~hùk" (chaos) around her father's "miia-nɔ́ɔi" (minor wife) and how her father's relationship with this lover had affected her mother. Another teacher told me about how it had felt when she had been the person first finding a member of the "Bangkok Flying Club", after the flight. Of course, not all teachers would want to open up and share her emotions like that. But if you connect with her to the degree that you can talk about your personal lives, the lessons will be much more interesting and more easily remembered.
• Anger, embarassment, surprise or joy - any real feeling is good. Ask the teacher to castigate or embarass you if you say something wrong (for fun, that is, but if she plays the role well, you'll feel something!)
• Use role play with the teacher. Many, many lessons were spent based on vocabulary and expressions from the dialogues available from pickup-thai.com. I reviewed the words and expressions, sent them to her, and we then agreed on two characters in a certain situation, like "two runaways trying to escape the police". The stories we created on the fly were sometimes hilarious. Once, we translated parts of the script for "Titanic" to Thai and played the roles of Rose and Jack – online🙂
• Find a picture of a beautiful girl on the internet, print it or put it on a tablet or pc, in an app that allows you to write or draw on the picture, relating words to what you see or think. 
• Think about how you would use a word or expression when talking to a TG, either imaginary or known. Motivation is everything. 

These are just a few examples of how you can use emotion in your learning process. The possibilities are endless. 

 

Repetition

Flashcards are good, the problem with them is that they normally are static, easily become boring and that they do not allow for your brain gradually gaining further and further insight into each word. I'm not talking so much about words like "cat" or "woods" here, but rather words that can have many different meanings, with different ways they can be used, and different "friends" - words they are often seen together with. Not to mention their cultural connections. In fact, this is the case even for "cat" and "woods".

Thai has many words that are multisemantic - with many, many meanings and ways of use. Extreme examples are "bpai" and "maa" ("go" and "come"), but even a word like "flower" can mean several things, not to mention that together with another word, it has even more meanings, like "interest rate" and an extremely vulgar word for a sex worker.

Repetition becomes much more meaningful if you do not limit yourself to passively trying to connect one particular meaning of an English word to an often very limited understanding of a Thai word. 

Here's what you could do instead, using a flashcard system like the ones suggested by you, @particle, or a simple recorder app allowing for short notes like the one I mentioned above, or just looking up things and writing notes when repeating.

• Explode the word, by looking up in a dictionary the different meanings of the word, and sentences where it is used. The "Talking Thai" app is great for that, a weakness being that some of the examples they give are a bit formal. "Thai-English" (both apps described in my former post) gives simpler, but fewer examples. 
• Contrast the word by finding words with the opposite meaning (antonyms). 
• Compare the word with words that have similar or related meaning. 
• Analyze the word, especially if it is made up of several words - look up each one of them to find all the meanings. 

You can put the word in a search engine and see what pictures pop up. If you can read Thai, then try to search for it in Thai discussion fora. 

 

Miscellaneous

• Learn in different locations – research shows that it helps memory. Go outside, sit at a cafe, change the room you sit in. Take a walk while listening. 
• Use tests - either have your teacher create them, or make them yourselves. Again, research shows that it helps memory. 
• Try to study a particular subject in Thai, with the help of a teacher or by yourself. Research shows that when concentrating on something you are interested in, learning Thai not being the main objective, you'll learn Thai very naturally on the way. 
• Avoid passive memorization and reciting at all cost. Always ask yourself or your teacher questions about what you learn – everything you do not understand or wonder about are golden opportunities to increase your knowledge. 
• One great method is to first tell your teacher something in Thai, say a story from your personal life. Next, have her tell the story to you. Make notes! Then try to tell her the same story again. You can even have her tell the story one more time, making more notes. 
• When learning grammar: Structure, restructure and group the content using diagrams, mindmaps or drawings. Evaluate what you made, look up the subject in several grammar books, find examples and re-draw your understanding of the subject. 
• Shift your focus when listening to spoken Thai, say a dialogue from pickup-thai.com. Such as: 1. Paying particular attention to when the "R" is replaced by "L" in spoken Thai. 2. The use of aspect markers/particles (very tricky). 3. The speaker's use of verbs. 
• Use hand gestures as a support to get the tones right. For the rising tone, I quickly draw an "U" in the air, for the rising tone I draw a "J", for the low tone I lower my hand, for the falling tone a "U" upside down, and for the mid-tone I simply draw a horizontal line. The practicing of tones is particularly difficult if your mother tongue is not a tonal language, which is the case for all Germanic (English, German, Scandinavian language, Dutch...), all Romanic languages (Spanish, Italian, French...) and most Indian languages. I've found that the hand gestures help a lot, even when in a real situation (I explain to her why I do it and my gestures are barely noticable!)
• You have to have fun!  If not, change the method (or teacher). 

 

Edited May 26 by MarcusS

[poseidon5566]

14 hours ago, MarcusS said:

I guess your goal, @poseidon5566, would be B2 at first, and perhaps, later on, C1?

 

To be honest my memorised thai vocabulary can be broadly described as 10 words. my current goal is just to build to something by cracking on with it to something decent and go from there into more formal learning. B2 and C1 i dont actually know what these terms mean. But i am reading your advice and will endeavour to add it to the programme I'm building for my self   

Edited May 26 by poseidon5566

[poseidon5566]

20 hours ago, particle said:

I find the references to ladyboys in hobnailed boots and chickens a bit creepy....

I believe that's the idea, but it works. i would suggest to not take it seriously and just go with it and you will find yourself associating Thai letters with English ones fairly quickly. And reading 

[MarcusS]

8 hours ago, poseidon5566 said:

To be honest my memorised thai vocabulary can be broadly described as 10 words. my current goal is just to build to something by cracking on with it to something decent and go from there into more formal learning. B2 and C1 i dont actually know what these terms mean. But i am reading your advice and will endeavour to add it to the programme I'm building for my self   

Thanks for being honest. I thought you were quite advanced due to for example this: 

On 19/05/2024 at 19:34, poseidon5566 said:

I'm not sure I'm sticking with my current Thai tutor and wont name him here im also doing this after learning to read and am currently reading dan brown's inferno translated into thai with him.

You also mentioned that you want to be fluent and that you have 12 months on you. 

If your goal is to be able to speak with TGs in 12 months, then I don't think approaching this goal like a schoolboy learning to write and read, receiving formal lessons from a teacher, is a good way. Why do you start with Dan Brown? If you want to learn Thai, a project like that might be valueable years from now, when you have a vocabulary of more than 10 000 words at least, thorough understanding of grammar, and want to concentrate on the written version of Thai, not everyday conversation. 

I wasted a lot of time in the beginning, using an app that put me on the path of speaking like a book. Many of the first, say, 100 words and phrases I learned from the app turned out to be very formal and would likely have made people laugh had I used them in everyday conversations. 

Things like that are not easy to know when you're a beginner. 

I guess David Smith´s introduction to Thai, mentioned above, might be a good start when you're a novice or at an intermediate level, although I haven't read it. 

My approach as a novice was to purchase the learning materials from https://learnthaistyle.com and have a teacher from that website help me. 

Using the methods and apps described in the posts above to build a first vocabulary of 500-1000 words, emphasizing tones and pronounciation, is very realistic in 12 months. Rote memorization and the spaced repetition method is the way to go at this stage.

I would have tried to learn as much grammar as possible by myself, reserving the teacher's role to answering questions and explaining what was not clear. 

Speaking thai with the teacher from as early on as possible is also helpful, as I haven´t mentioned the most helpful tip of them all:

Use what you learn. 

Best of luck and keep us posted how it goes!

Edited May 27 by MarcusS

[joeyb]

On 23/05/2024 at 18:27, particle said:

The conventional wisdom is that it is important to learn to at least read Thai and I agree, learning reasonable pronunciation is impossible otherwise.

Could you explain this one? How would reading help pronunciation?

I would say it's far more important to listen to a lot of Thai, in order to learn the sounds of the language.

[MarcusS]

2 hours ago, joeyb said:

How would reading help pronunciation?

As for the sounds, my experience was that I needed to listen, and practice, and listen and practice again and again, every single word. Normally, it took several weeks really to both remember the word and get the pronounciation right. 

The Talking Thai dictionary was immensely useful for that task, as I've explained above.

A written version of the words were useful because it is sometimes difficult to discern all the sounds in a word. 

Apart from the sounds: unless you're a genious, or very young, simply listening to Thai will only get you so far. You´d need a written version of Thai, whether the Paiboon+ transliteration system, or Thai written with Thai letters. 

This is an example of Paiboon+ transliterations of a Thai dialogue (a silly one, and the beginning of the very first of nearly a hundred stories from pickup-thai, the last 35 of them very long).

The marks above the wovels show the tone of the syllable, whether rising, falling, high or low (no mark means mid-tone). A double vowel means a long vowel, while a single vowel means that the vowel is short. There are spaces between the words, line shifts, punctuation, and question marks.  All this makes reading more easy. 

Then, there are four special letters used for four particular vowels that do not have an easy equivalent in English. These letters are not difficult to learn. 

Still, this is not completely as Thai is spoken. For instance, "r" is often replaced by "l". An example is "arai", which is often replaced by "alai", depending on age, status, situation and so on. 

@particle, an honest question: In what ways would Thai written in the Thai alphabet be superior to Paiboon+ for someone wanting to learn Thai?

Edited May 27 by MarcusS

[particle]

1 hour ago, MarcusS said:

 

@particle, an honest question: In what ways would Thai written in the Thai alphabet be superior to Paiboon+ for someone wanting to learn Thai?

I don't know Paiboon so I don't know how accurate it is, but public signs etc. are written in Thai, also you would be limited to learning resources that use it, also you can't ask Thai people to write down or spell a new word in Paiboon.......

But mainly, as I said in a previous post, for anyone wanting to go beyond the basics, not being able to read a language would be a handicap just like not being able to read English would be a handicap.

I'm not a great reader (yet?), but I'm really, really glad I made the effort. As well as the reasons I mentioned, I feel far more connected to the language.

It's not the easiest script, but it's quite doable over a few weeks or less which is a small proportion of the time spent learning the language.

 

[particle]

3 hours ago, joeyb said:

Could you explain this one? How would reading help pronunciation?

I would say it's far more important to listen to a lot of Thai, in order to learn the sounds of the language.

Yes, you absolutely need to listen to a lot of Thai as well. 

There is a school of thought that says you can learn Thai purely by listening.... good luck with that!

Otherwise, you have to save words in written form to learn / revise them.

Not everyone pronounces the same, you need a standard to compare to and you need to learn sounds for vowels and consonants which don't have a direct equivalent in English. 

If you're listening to Thai and also have the written text, eg You Tube Thai speakers with Thai subtitles, your brain can connect the sounds they are making with the Thai script without having to go through the layer of transliteration which may not have the nuance.

In any case, not all resources use the same transliteration.

Also, I think because the transliteration uses English letters (or European, you know what I mean....) it's harder to avoid speaking with your native accent even if you try to copy the Thai speaker.

You can then save a word in Thai script and know accurately how it's pronounced just by reading it (I also save the sound spoken by a Thai speaker with my flashcards), as well as knowing how to pronounce new words you've seen but not heard.

Just my opinion, my Thai is currently only at lower intermediate level so don't take my advice too seriously, but learning Thai script is the advice of the experts and I'm very glad I took it....

 

 

 

 

 

 

[particle]

On 26/05/2024 at 21:35, poseidon5566 said:

To be honest my memorised thai vocabulary can be broadly described as 10 words. my current goal is just to build to something by cracking on with it to something decent and go from there into more formal learning. B2 and C1 i dont actually know what these terms mean. But i am reading your advice and will endeavour to add it to the programme I'm building for my self   

Highly recommend you at least have a look at the Smyth links I posted, both the book and the audio. It will give you a very good start, and not too dry.