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Best Thai Course for Beginners | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5183 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes  Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 25 of 29 29 November 2012 at 1:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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I like 'for beginners' series made by a Thai company.
I think it's different from the 'everyday' one. They are located in Thailand, so they use native speakers on recording for sure. They have made also courses for other Mainland SEA languages. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5171 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 26 of 29 29 November 2012 at 4:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Sorry that I'm too late, but nothing has been said on Living Language and I must say they do a good job for languages from Asia. Spoken World Thai is a fairly good book.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ling Diglot Groupie Taiwan Joined 4591 days ago 61 posts - 94 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Indonesian, Thai | Message 27 of 29 02 January 2013 at 4:21am | IP Logged | |||||
What edition was this? Because the edition I'm using (2005) shows tones everywhere: dialogues, vocab, etc.
The tone rules are explained at the beginning of the book, not as part of the course units. The script is gradually introduced during the units, but there's also a table at the beginning. Colloquial does teach reading and writing, but these remain of considerably lower priority in its curriculum than listening and speaking. The dialogues are all presented in Colloquial's own romaniztion system, and only selected ones are in Thai script, placed in the appendix. The vocab lists in the units don't show the script, but the glossaries at the back (both Thai-Eng and Eng-Thai) do show them. So though it's not what I'd like, you can still learn to read and write Thai with this book if you have the drive to do so. (Compare with Teach Yourself's Complete Japanese, which barely touches on reading or writing!) Becker's series is better for learning to read and write Thai, but I find its dialogues severely lacking. Colloquial's dialogues are excellent and filled with useful vocab and syntax. The CDs (which the course is useless without) feature several different speakers, male and female, who pronounce very clearly. This is Colloquial's strong suit: it equips you with speaking and listening skills, vocab and syntax that will get you functioning very well in Bangkok, with a sound foundation to proceed into more advanced learning. Never looked at Teach Yourself Thai so I can't comment. In any case, I'm an advocate of using more than one source text when studying a language. 1 person has 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 28 of 29 03 January 2013 at 3:22am | IP Logged | |||||
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Yes, I was using the 1994 edition. Looking at the Amazon reviews for both editions, it seems that other readers/learners also picked up on this problem (not indicating tones or teaching the way the script does so.) Including a tone chart for reference is also useful. If this has been fixed, Colloquial Thai looks quite good, I would say.
By the way, I think it’s helpful to know Mandarin when learning the Thai tones, although the sounds of the two languages are on the whole rather different. I’d just like to point out two ways in which you could be misled if you move from Mandarin to Thai. First, the Thai high tone is not really like Mandarin Tone 1, instead it resembles the rising Tone 2 (35), perhaps starting a bit higher up. And the Thai falling tone is quite different from Mandarin Tone 4, despite the fact that both are 51 – the Mandarin falling tone is more clipped or abrupt, the Thai falling tone has a kind of looping (on the way down) quality. Of course, the key is really to listen and imitate what you are hearing, not just go by the diagram. Edited by viedums on 03 January 2013 at 4:00am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| BrianDeAlabama Groupie United States Joined 4524 days ago 89 posts - 113 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 29 of 29 25 February 2013 at 1:52am | IP Logged | |||||
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You can buy the Thai New Testament on MP3 and listen to it. It only costs around $10 and you can download it to
your iPod. ---http://www.faithcomesbyheari ng.com/store/languageconfig---- Many chapters in the Bible are around 3-7 minutes and it will expose you to many structures of the language. Plus, you can find a bilingual New Testament with English and Thai side by side. I've been doing this with Spanish after many years of being top heavy on speaking and really weak on comprehension. After 1 month of doing this my listening comprehension doubled. I plan on using the method for Lao and Thai. I will not be able to jump into it real soon but maybe in around a year or two. I am married to a Lao/Thai-American and have family in both countries. My plan will be a long term plan. Plus there is a Lao/Thai Baptist church where my family attends so I will be able to have exposure to native speakers. I'm looking forward to trying it. Thanks for posting the various Thai courses. I'll doubtless pick up a couple of those programs. I'll probably buy some of Decker's Thai courses too just because I have the Lao already by her. Fluency is will be achieved via many sources. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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