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Best Thai Course for Beginners | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6234 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 9 of 29 09 November 2012 at 10:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
I tried the DLI course. It is VERY comprehensive but really hard to follow as a non-DLI student. None of the audio files are labelled and the modules are all broken up.
I'm curious, what methods have you been trying?? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5135 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 10 of 29 10 November 2012 at 12:55am | IP Logged | |||||
What if your goal is also to gain literacy in the language? R. == Edited by hrhenry on 10 November 2012 at 12:57am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5135 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 11 of 29 10 November 2012 at 8:37am | IP Logged | |||||
It is much easier to learn to read once you have a good understanding of the spoken language; reading then comes natural, and pronunciation won't be a problem. In my opinion, and in particular regarding languages as foreign as Thai, it is much better to learn the basics through listening (or interacting) first, while, as with every language, the bulk of the less frequent vocabulary will necessarily need to be acquired through extensive reading. But that's after pronunciation, prosody, basic social rules and basic sentence structure have been solidly acquired. I'm all for literacy! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5135 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 12 of 29 10 November 2012 at 8:46am | IP Logged | |||||
I started out with educational DVDs for kids, narrow listening to short news segments, and listening to a tutor describing picture books in great detail for many tens of hours, and then moved on to custom-made podcasts and easy-to-follow TV (travel shows, lifestyle and food programs). That brought me to intermediate comprehension skills, an excellent starting point for speaking on the one hand, and reading and writing on the other. But I don't want to hijack your thread. I just wanted to give feedback and add to the diversity of answers. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| hamba Diglot Newbie Australia Joined 6736 days ago 22 posts - 32 votes Speaks: English*, Indonesian Studies: Arabic (classical), Urdu | Message 13 of 29 11 November 2012 at 8:28am | IP Logged | |||||
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Liddytime,
Hope you might find this helpful in your Thai quest. Stuart Raj is a polyglot and pretty good at Thai. His wife is thai and he speaks it fluently. He often appears on Thai tv as a presenter. He has this site... http://stujay.com/2007/10/18/stuart-jay-raj%E2%80%99s-cracki ng-thai-fundamentals-ctf-podcasts-on-radiobangkok-net/ It used to be simple to access all his thai teaching materials but as his "fame" has increased his website has become increasingly difficult to find anything. Anyhow there is some good stuff on Stu's ideas on learning thai etc. He's good, I went to college with him and studied Indonesian with him..... All the best. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4671 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 14 of 29 11 November 2012 at 2:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I’ve had a chance to look at Colloquial Thai, just a couple of comments.
It looks quite interesting in terms of content (vs. TYT where the dialogs tend to be in tourist situations like bargaining at a market, ordering in a restaurant etc.) and it may cover more grammar than TYT. However, I see two drawbacks to CT. First, it only indicates tone in the vocab lists and the glossary, not when the words are used in dialogs or exercises. It’s really crucial to get the tones down in Thai, just as in Mandarin. If you read Thai script, the tones are always indicated, which suggests how important this feature is. So not having them when you’re reading connected text is a problem, unless you go and fill them in yourself. The second problem with CT is the way it teaches the script. It devotes a fair amount of space to this, but the authors never explain the system of tone marks and consonant classes that I mentioned here earlier and that TYT does such a good job with. At one point (p. 77) they state: “This book will not enable you to read Thai words that you do not know, so you do not need at this stage to try to work out the tone from the written Thai.” Imagine learning the Latin alphabet and being told “this will only work for the words we teach you, don’t attempt to read anything else.” Absurd! It’s conceivable that a learner might get something out of CT as a second or third textbook, after learning the basics elsewhere. (I don’t have the audio component, so I can’t judge that aspect of CT.) But really at that point you would want to be reading things in Thai script. By the way, there is no standard way to write Thai using Latin letters, another reason to learn the script. It’s true that some books in the Colloquial series are really good, for instance I liked Kan Qian’s one for Chinese. Another excellent one in my view is Colloquial Cambodian, which was actually written by David Smyth, the author of TYT. The presentation and subject matter are quite similar to TYT’s actually, I suspect he may have used the Thai volume as a template. I guess that means we can’t judge these textbooks by the series they appear in. Often the choices the individual author makes, as well as the unique features of each language, will determine whether the book succeeds in giving a good introduction to the language. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| BrianDeAlabama Groupie United States Joined 4524 days ago 89 posts - 113 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 15 of 29 12 November 2012 at 10:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I started Pimsleur Thai but got "bogged down" with school work. I look forward to
getting back into Thai and Lao. There is a Lao & Thai Baptist church not far from where I live. In a year or so I may visit them a little more often. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6234 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 16 of 29 13 November 2012 at 5:07am | IP Logged | |||||
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So, as a result of the unanimous selection for Teach Yourself Thai (though I think the power in my study was slightly
questionable) I ordered myself a copy that hopefully will be here tomorrow. I agree that TY seems to be a much better laid out course than Colloquial. The women at "Women Learning Thai" rave about it as well. I have seen a few of Stuart Raj's videos and they are quite good, especially his "learn the Thai script with hand signals" ones! 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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