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1 Year in Thailand: From basic+ to ....? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| DanWorld Groupie Thailand Joined 4899 days ago 40 posts - 50 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Spanish, Russian | Message 9 of 21 21 March 2012 at 12:40pm | IP Logged |
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Current studying
Thai for Intermediate Learners by Benjawan Poomsan Becker The continuation of the series. Looks to be quite educational. I like how it has a good dose of interesting Thai culture as well. I did chapter 1 of 10 already, and I think the progress will be smooth. Wordpower Thai Iphone App This is a great vocabulary program. It basically categorizes 1500 common Thai words, each one with a picture, audio, and sample sentences. I go through each category and add words to Anki which I don't yet have. This allows me to continue my studies easily when I'm out and about with my Iphone, which is often. As you do each category, the little "progress batteries" fill up, which is a fun motivator. It gives it a bit of a game feeling; like leveling up your skills in a MMORPG. Children's Books I'm pretty happy that I can start to make out children's books. They include plenty of words I don't know, but they are real native media that I'm beginning to be able to read. This is a great thing about living here in Thailand: the bookstores are packed full of Thai reading at all levels. There are also tons of books for Thai people to learn English, and many of these are useful for me as well. However, my main focus is still on the materials I mentioned above. There is still lots of low-hanging fruit for me to learn before I take on native material, even that intended for small children. And the language found in literature for Thai children has its own twists and turns that may not be so useful for other areas. I'm thinking that after I finish the Intermediate Learners Book, and all the words in the Wordpower App, I'll be at a whole new level, perhaps even basic fluency. I figure that's about 2 months away. We will see. Edited by DanWorld on 21 March 2012 at 1:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| DanWorld Groupie Thailand Joined 4899 days ago 40 posts - 50 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Spanish, Russian | Message 10 of 21 26 March 2012 at 10:08am | IP Logged |
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Flashcard Oppression
Well, after going several weeks at 30 words per day, it's time to change tactics. My Anki deck has 2114 cards currently. The goal is to learn Thai, not build a gigantic Anki deck. I'm still working, running a business, building a life, and trying to stay sane. Recently, I have just been spending too much time doing Anki and trying to find 30 new words/day. This is especially taxing as earlier, I was already familiar with probably 50% of the words I was adding. It's started to feel like a real chore, and that's not how this should be. I would find myself doing silly things to keep up the 30 words/day. I think it's really fun to try to figure out what's going on in children's books, but I'm having no time for this as I'm chained to Anki. It's impossible to map an entire language to Anki. Your brain has to get in there somehow. And this feeling of being overwhelmed, it's not Anki's fault. It's the problem of doing 30 new flash cards per day while maintaining a full time job and life. Anki handles such a goal as well as is possible. Here's how I'm seeing things now: Anki is a wonderful tool to use in the early stages, as you're going through language courses. It helps you advance quickly and really absorb everything taught. Then, you move on to native materials, which serve as a natural SRS, are way more interesting, and build up the context that is required. You can still continue to use Anki, but it should remain as a supplement and not get in the way of things. Anki is still awesome though, don't get me wrong. And I shouldn't forget to mention here that it was an efficient way for me to learn to read the Thai script. But it's a tool that you have to know how to use. My current plan is to change it to 15-20 words per day. This should move it down to the fun supplemental tool that it's meant to be. I will also be focusing a lot more on making progress in the book "Thai for Intermediate Learners"; learning through that book is very efficient, there's lots of meat there for me. I will be freed from the obsession of having to add cards to Anki just to keep up with the 30 words/day thing, and this should make things much more pleasant. And I don't think this is a defeat or a changing of my language ambitions. It's just recognizing that my old system was no longer optimal, and switching to a new system. Time that I was previously spending chained to Anki will be going towards more fruitful things. Edited by DanWorld on 26 March 2012 at 10:29am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| DanWorld Groupie Thailand Joined 4899 days ago 40 posts - 50 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Spanish, Russian | Message 11 of 21 31 March 2012 at 1:16pm | IP Logged |
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Life with moderate Anki
I've been continuing my studies with Anki set to 15 words per day and things are better. The last couple of days the reviews have come down. Anki is once again becoming a fun, and useful tool, not an all-consuming chore. It's a great realization to have that I will not be somehow mapping the entire Thai language in to Anki cards. I'm no longer adding every word I see. I'm actually deleting/suspending cards which I feel are not efficient, such as rare, childish words I saw in a children's story; I'm confident in the knowledge that if such words are important, I'll see them again anyway. There is no reason to have such words pounded in to my head with Anki. I'm now really focusing on "Thai for Intermediate Learners" and almost every new Anki card is a vocab word from that book. I'm finishing up chapter 6 of 10. I feel like I'm making real progress, instead of feeling like a scatterbrain with a head full of words I feel bad that I can't spit out on demand. Also, the 15 new Anki cards per day does not mean that I am learning only 15 words per day. This doesn't mean that after a year of this I will know exactly an additional 5475 words. Learning language is much more fluid than that and that's a bad way to measure it. For example, "Thai for Intermediate Learners" has been going over various core words which act as suffixes, such as gaan (การ) and kwaam (ความ). This may count as only 2 words, but actually, if you can use these words, you now know several hundred new words almost immediately, and thousands of new words as you become more fluent. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes  Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 12 of 21 31 March 2012 at 1:41pm | IP Logged |
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I think you have the right approach to Anki, and it's good that you've realized in time that you were going to burn out! 30 words a day, though doable, cannot really be sustained for many months as you end up spending all your time trying to find which words to add. I've had exactly the same situation with Mandarin in the past. 15 words a day is still an awful lot by many people's standard, and a lot of people struggle with even 10 words.
I think it's also a matter of plateau: after your initial exposure to the language, you realise that you know some grammar but have no vocabulary to express it: you learn 30 words a day for a month or two, and the situation is inverted: you've used up the beginner vocabulary, and now every word you learn seem to belong to a level of language you cannot use yet, and it's a sign that it's time to reduce the amount of vocabulary intake and focus on developing your skills a bit more. That cycle should repeat one more time in the intermediate level, I believe, and after that, you can start blasting through more advanced vocabulary without really needing to look for those 30 words a day, they come quite well by themselves... 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| DanWorld Groupie Thailand Joined 4899 days ago 40 posts - 50 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Spanish, Russian | Message 13 of 21 03 April 2012 at 2:12pm | IP Logged |
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Thai Transliteration
Of all the various systems of writing and transliterating Thai, the most efficient is the Thai script itself. For example, the Thai word for "sleepy" is "ง่วง". It is commonly transliterated as "ngûang". In Thai, there are 4 data points, whereas the transliteration has 7. This is how it is in the majority of cases. Though Thai can use some nasty vowel syntax sometimes and those transliterations actually contain less data. For example, the Thai word for "tired" is kind of ugly "เหนื่อย". The transliteration is "nèuay". This is 7 data points vs 6 data points; and a more common transliteration system would combine the "eu" in to a single letter, making this only 5 data points. Also, some Thai words have irregular spellings and quite gratuitous silent letters. Still, I have found that learning words based only on the Thai writing makes them stick better. It is much less clutter in my head. And of course, you are severely handicapping yourself in the long term learning of Thai if you never learn the script. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| DanWorld Groupie Thailand Joined 4899 days ago 40 posts - 50 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Spanish, Russian | Message 14 of 21 11 April 2012 at 11:53am | IP Logged |
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I Finished Thai for Intermediate Learners
Well, I finished Thai for Intermediate Learners. It's pretty neat having passed an "intermediate" course. It took me about 3 weeks I see -- since I stopped the obsession with creating 30 new Anki cards per day, and just focused on completing the courses, I've been making quicker progress. Overall it was a good book. It presented useful vocabulary, demonstrated its use, showed some key grammar and usage, and taught you some Thai culture in the process. I've started on the next and final book in the series, "Thai for Advanced Readers". It's a wonderful book for where I'm at - the format is a section of Thai writing, followed by vocabulary definitions and then the full English translation. After this book, however, there is literally nothing else more advanced in the entire learning Thai section of the bookstore, and the English bookstores in Bangkok have just about everything available. There are tons of books geared towards beginners, but nothing for this level. In fact, the second most advanced book available is probably the "Intermediate" one I just finished. I have heard that after finishing the "Advanced" book, one can proceed on to studying actual Thai newspapers. Also, I found several good online reading/study resources around this same level which will help me bridge this gap to native materials. Here are links in case somebody else gets to this point and can use them: http://www.retire2th...eading-thai.php http://blog.joshsager.com/downloads/ http://siamwestdc.co...er-UH/index.htm http://readingthai.w...e-volume-1.html Edited by DanWorld on 12 April 2012 at 1:00pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| DanWorld Groupie Thailand Joined 4899 days ago 40 posts - 50 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Spanish, Russian | Message 15 of 21 17 April 2012 at 3:45pm | IP Logged |
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Switching Gears Again
My studying started to feel forced, like unpleasant work I had to do. Eventually, I realized some new things. My last method wasn't working well anymore. The idea was basically to consume "Thai for Advanced Readers" and enter everything in to Anki. This worked out ok with the previous two books in the course as most of that vocab was common and useful. However, TFAR contains lots of uncommon -- even esoteric -- vocabulary, and there's so much more useful vocabulary out there for me to focus on. I was aware of this and it was killing me having to drill that stuff in to my head. I found the top 5,000 most frequent Thai words and I can see that there are lots of words I do not know yet with frequencies much higher than that of most of the words being taught in TFAR. Also, it's not much fun having to comb through a book and enter everything in to Anki. So, I've started a new method. I've basically separated language engagement from Anki. I will simply read with a dictionary, and not bother entering any words in to Anki; I've started doing this and reading has become much more enjoyable and still educational, perhaps more so than with the Anki ball and chain. And it's more than just reading books, I'm talking about all engagement with the language: tv, conversation, movies, street signs, etc. But Anki is much too valuable of a tool to forsake completely, so I will also be learning the vocab from the top 5,000 words in conjunction with Anki. I do not plan on entering anything else in to Anki besides these words. All the other vocabulary and learning will be going on in my brain. This deck can also serve as my permanent "Thai language maintenance" deck for when I am perhaps away from the Thai language for years at a time. Edited by DanWorld on 17 April 2012 at 3:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| dbag Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5020 days ago 605 posts - 1046 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 16 of 21 18 April 2012 at 12:14am | IP Logged |
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Great to see someone learning thai on here. I'm surprised there don't seem to be more.
Are you planning on using fsi at all? I know it doesn't teach script, but I would imagine there's not many better courses out there for speaking skills. Have you looked at it? If so, do you have any idea how complete it is, and how far it could take someone? Whereabouts in Thailand are you? 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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