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Thai: Alphabet or romanization? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5734 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 1 of 18 13 December 2011 at 10:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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I plan to begin learning Thai soon and I wonder whether I should learn it using one of the romanizations of Thai first or just learn using the Thai alphabet? Edited by mick33 on 13 December 2011 at 10:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jarvis1000 Diglot Groupie United States want2speakthai.com Joined 4698 days ago 74 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English*, Thai Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 18 13 December 2011 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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For me I learned the romanization first, because the goal is to learn to speak/listen first. From there you can then switch to learning the Thai alphabet and writing system. Don't depend on them too long though. Just use it as a boost till you are on your language feet then go back and learn the Characters.
I only say this because Thai has much more of a foriegn feel to it as compared to German or Spanish for example. Therefore you want to focus your time and energy, at first at least, getting used to this new world. After 4 or 5 months, you will have the feel for Thai and it will make learning the alphabet easier. I was also taught a form of romanization that made transitioning to Thai script easier. Since there is no standard Romanization out there, I would convert everything into my form so That I could keep it consistant. If you want I can Give it to you. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| allen Newbie United States Joined 4894 days ago 23 posts - 73 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Thai | Message 3 of 18 15 December 2011 at 2:27am | IP Logged | ||
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I would highly recommend just learning the alphabet from the start. It's very useful and
not that hard to learn. As was stated before, there's no standardize Romanization, so you'd have learn a new system with each new resource. Also Thai has a lot of sounds that aren't neatly represented by Roman characters, so I find that it's easy to be misled by reading a transliteration unless you're very careful. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5734 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 4 of 18 15 December 2011 at 10:30am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the responses. I have also done some reading about this on my own and am strongly leaning toward learning the alphabet. I found a website that shows 12 romanization systems and explains their strengths and weaknesses. I think all of them look very flawed.
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| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6360 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 5 of 18 15 December 2011 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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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. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| allen Newbie United States Joined 4894 days ago 23 posts - 73 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Thai | Message 6 of 18 15 December 2011 at 4:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would recommend the links from this site if you want to learn the alphabet. Pretty
much everything you need to know about reading Thai is contained in the following 3 pages. They come with audio clips which I found very helpful. http://thai-language.com/ref/consonants http://thai-language.com/ref/vowels http://thai-language.com/ref/tone-rules (find the chart about half-way down called tone-rule summary) It's basically just memorizing the letters and the tone rules. Maybe 100 or so things to memorize. It's nothing like Chinese where you have to memorize thousands of characters. In my experience memorizing the letters and understanding the rules takes just a couple weeks. I'm sure many people have done the same. I would say just use flashcards or something like that until you get the basic idea, and then just try reading stuff and going back to the charts to check if you forgot how to pronounce a letter or tone. Another advantage of learning to read is that most native speakers can write in Thai but almost none of them will know how to use Romanization. Edited by allen on 15 December 2011 at 5:05pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Jarvis1000 Diglot Groupie United States want2speakthai.com Joined 4698 days ago 74 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English*, Thai Studies: Spanish | Message 7 of 18 15 December 2011 at 9:08pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree 100 percent. I learned the sounds of Thai script in 2 days. But it was months before I could read it at a fast enough rate to keep my train of thought. Thai is mostly phonetical, but it puts vowels before, after, above and below the vowel. Couple that with tone markers and that you need to not just know the 5 tones of Thai but how that translates into written form(including why sometimes there is inherit tone and how that tone marker will affect the inherit tone). Then with all that, you add in that Thai doesn't put spaces between words, only phrases clauses and sentences, so you have to train your eyes to see the words in this sea of unfamiliar characters. Given all that, one might understand why those of us who are already fluent in Thai, recomend using romanization to get you started. Its easier to learn to read if you can already speak. It's hard to sound out a word if you don't already know how the word is supposed to sound. You can do what you like, but my priority in learning a language is to learn to speak and understand what is being said first. Reading and writing come next after I am sufficiently conversational in the language. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| allen Newbie United States Joined 4894 days ago 23 posts - 73 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Thai | Message 8 of 18 16 December 2011 at 6:43am | IP Logged | ||
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If you learned the script in 2 days I'd say that's already very useful for very little
investment. At least you can start to use a normal dictionary. The more you care about proper pronunciation the more work you'll have to put into understanding the Romanization as they aren't always intuitive. But by that point you might as well have just learned the Thai script from the start. If you learn to read Thai by using audio clips with each letter, since Thai is phonetic, at least you'll know exactly how the words should sound, even if it takes you a little longer. For me I learned the Thai alphabet before anything else, which took about 2 weeks. It's true that at first you won't be able to read that fast. But in my experience, I found that most reference materials had both the Thai script and a Romanization. So when if I had trouble reading the Thai, I could check with the transliteration. Doing it this way, I could read the transliteration intuitively. I didn't have to worry about what 'uu' or 'bp' should sound like, or not realizing 'a' is short and 'aa' is long, because I already knew those things directly from reading the Thai script. It also kept my progress relatively quick, and I had immediate feedback on how well I was reading the Thai script. Edited by allen on 16 December 2011 at 7:15am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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