Thai: Alphabet or romanization? (Specific Languages) Language Learning Forum

Thai: Alphabet or romanization?
Tags: Alphabets \| Thai
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Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages

18 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3

IronFist
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6441 days ago
663 posts - 941 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Korean

Message 17 of 18

15 February 2012 at 5:44pm | IP Logged

leosmith wrote:

I recommend starting with romanization, but at the same time learning Thai script on the side, and weening yourself off of romanization as soon as practical. That's because unlike many
other scripts (Japanese kana and Russian Cyrillic for example), Thai is extremely complicated and time consuming to learn. It would drive me up the wall to be crippled by poor mastery of a
script for a long period of time. I liken learning Thai without romanization to learning Mandarin without pinyin. Possible, but not very efficient. And although I hear a lot of people suggest
not using romanization, I haven't met a single westerner who has become fluent like that. I have met several who are fluent, and many more on line, who have used romanization. Couple
that with the fact that almost all Thai language schools use romanization in the beginning, and I think you have a pretty strong argument for romanization.

Luckily, there is an excellent set of books/cds that does exactly what I described.
Thai for Beginners
Intermediate, and Advanced. The romanization she uses is very good.

Agreed with all of this, including that book recommendation.

andlikeJarvis1000said, Thaidoesn'tputspacesbetweenwordssohuavefunwiththat.
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IronFist
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6441 days ago
663 posts - 941 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Korean

Message 18 of 18

15 February 2012 at 6:01pm | IP Logged

I disagree that the alphabet can be learned in a "couple hours."

This is based on my own experience with Thai. When I was 17 I had a brief interest in the language (hence my supporting of the "Thai for Beginners" book recommendation above, which is a very good book).

I learned hiragana in like two weeks.

I learn hangeul (Korean writing) in a few days.

I learned Cyrillic in a few days.

Every time I tried to study Thai writing, I got nowhere.

It could just be the way my brain is wired, though. Every Thai letter looks the same to me, and I could never get them to "click" in my brain.

Then again, I didn't really study it that hard.

I also seem to remember there were confusing rules, like there are different ways to write the same letter depending on the tone or something like that. Does that sound right?

I'm gonna say start with romanization and be teaching yourself the script on the side. If you go with the script first, I can't see you progressing fast enough to keep yourself interested.

Start with romanization for Japanese and Thai because they are more complicated and will slow your progress at first.

Learn the script for Russian and Korean because they are relatively simple and because romanization systems for these languages are actually worse and will slow you down. Korean romanization is awful and will actually make your Korean progress slower.

If I remember correctly, the most complicated thing about Thai is the writing. There are no crazy noun cases, no verbs with 48 different possible endings depending on who is doing something and what the tense is, and no noun gender. Adjectives come after the nouns like in Spanish. Oh, and there are 5 tones which might take a little while to get used to if you don't have any experience with a tonal language.
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