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Thai: Alphabet or romanization? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4988 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 9 of 18 16 December 2011 at 12:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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A lot of people think that you should first learn to listen.
but I think listening should come after reading. because reading is generally easier in my opiion. I would be scared of trying to listen to Thai first (even though we have Thai TV). I find it useful to have textbook with THai script and Roman spelling at the same time. This way you can get used to the script easily. 2 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 10 of 18 18 December 2011 at 10:16am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Edited by mick33 on 18 December 2011 at 10:17am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6360 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 11 of 18 19 December 2011 at 2:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
(The following is meant for westerners learning Thai)
I'm not trying to discourage anyone, but let's not trivialize learning to read Thai. If you want, you can think about it as needing to learn the following (I'm not suggesting this is the order to learn): 1) Consonants, vowels, numbers, grammatical symbols, tone marks, etc. You can memorize these in a few hours. 2) Tone and pronunciation rules. You can memorize these in a few hours. 3) Vocabulary. This will take many months, more likely years, to learn. 4) Reading practice. This will also take many months, more likely years. Obviously, you won't understand what you're reading without 3). But something that's more true for Thai than most other languages is that it's necessary to know 3) for a text to even be able to pronounce it correctly. This is because you need to know where the words break. So even if you know 1) and 2) really well, and you have done lots of 4), if you read something out loud, you make tons of mistakes unless you know 3). If you know 1), 2) & 3) for Mandarin, you will be pretty well understood if you read something out loud. Word breaks don't affect pronunciation much, and most characters only have one reading. For Japanese, you will make tons of mistakes, since there are multiple readings per kanji. So you have to know your vocabulary before being able to correctly pronounce written Thai or Japanese, and learning vocabulary is very time consuming.
Regarding number of characters, I completely agree with you. But my point was that not using romanization for learning Thai is inefficient, in the same way as not using pinyin (or some other phonetic script) for learning Mandarin. If you use Cyrillic from the beginning when learning Russian, you will probably struggle for a few weeks, then be in the clear. But with Thai, this struggle will likely last months. Until you get comfortable with the script, you won’t feel secure about the pronunciation of new words. You can get around this by using audio for every word, but I find that audio is much more effective if I have something written down that I understand. More than likely, you will fossilize pronunciation mistakes, which is supposed to be one of the main reasons for avoiding Romanization in the first place. If you use a well designed Romanized script along with the Thai, you will be able to learn the language at a normal speed until you are ready to dump the Romanization. There is one very well advertised language school in Thailand that doesn’t use Romanization. But they don’t even teach conversation, and they have never had a student pass the Thai proficiency test, which is used to enter Thai universities, apply for certain jobs. The school is basically a visa-mill, so don’t be seduced by their propaganda.
Language learners like to use certain tricks. One of them is to become proficient in one of the 4 basic skills (reading/writing/speaking/listening) and use it to bootstrap them to learn the rest of the language. Imo, the right skill to do this with depends not only on the learner, but the language. I believe Thai lends itself to speaking more than reading or listening for the average western learner. However, if a person is dead set on using reading to do this, then they should learn good pronunciation early on to avoid fossilization. This is the same advice I would give for learners of other tonal languages. So I advise getting good pronunciation early on. And I advise using conversation if you must bootstrap. But I want to make it clear that I don't think someone should go overboard with bootstrapping. Making conversation a priority is ok, but don't completely neglect other aspects of the language. It's hard to develop good pronunciation without lots of listening practice, and some reading, so be sure to have some balance. There is another well advertised language school in Thailand that uses hundreds of hours of listening to bootstrap it’s students into learning the language. I have been very unimpressed with the results of this method. I have read about them online, and heard testimonials from several students. Don’t be seduced by their propaganda either. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| allen Newbie United States Joined 4894 days ago 23 posts - 73 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Thai | Message 12 of 18 20 December 2011 at 6:15am | IP Logged | ||||||||
You make it sound like you can't read a sentence in Thai unless you know ever word in that sentence. But that's not true. There are ambiguous cases sometimes but if you understand how the alphabet and tone markers work, often it's clear where words end and begin. But I agree it takes getting used to. For me I never felt like it was a big problem though because I would look up words that I didn't know as I came across them and then it wasn't that hard to find where the breaks were. But I realize though that many people don't like to read that way.
That's not how it works. Thai is still phonetic. The fact that there are no breaks in between words is not a problem of pronunciation, it's a problem of distinguishing words. You'll never pronounce words incorrectly if you understand the alphabet and tone rules(except for some very rare irregular pronunciations), even in the case that you divided them incorrectly into words that don't exist. If you really think that the tone rules and alphabet can be learned in hours, then there's no danger of fossilizing incorrect pronunciation. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6360 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 13 of 18 20 December 2011 at 2:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Unless you're reading material designed for a learner or a child, you will make at least one pronunciation mistake in almost every sentence if you don't know the vocabulary.
ผลไม้ เศรษฐกิจ Even at the word level, Thai is not phonetic. It's a lot more common than you apparently realize. But that was not my point. To someone just getting on top of the rules, coming up with the correct pronunciation at the word level is quite difficult. There are going to be big question marks in the heads of students on an unacceptably large percentage of words for the first few months, if they don't use romanization. Edited by leosmith on 20 December 2011 at 2:58pm 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 14 of 18 21 December 2011 at 12:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||
You have to know enough words and be comfortable enough with the language to "see" the word with out breaks. If you don't know any or very few words in a sentence, then you will be spending most of your time in dictionaries trying to figure out what the words are. Even then there is enough exceptions, on first glance one would think they knew how to pronounce พลพล and continue on not realizing, because it looks intuitive. The funny thing about exceptions, in any language,is that they may only apply to a minority of words, but in my experience, they seem to apply to many of the most commonly used words. Look what most are saying is that you waste lots of valuable time at the beginning of your language learning journey if you ONLY learn Thai script. If you learn romanization along side Thai script you can spend much more time learning to speak Thai, which will make your ability to read Thai much more easier. Yes we can agree to disagree as well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Po-ru Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5290 days ago 173 posts - 235 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Spanish, Norwegian, Mandarin, French | Message 15 of 18 21 December 2011 at 8:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Where would you recommend learning the alphabet? I tried a few times but found a real lack of good resources online to learn it. Any suggestions? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4476 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 16 of 18 15 February 2012 at 1:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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David Smyth's "Teach Yourself Thai" teaches the writing in a manageable way - the consonants are introduced in groups (mid, high and low). These in combination with tone marks determine the tone of each word. It's really not too difficult. Concerning pronunciation, if you have done some Mandarin and have got those tones down, Thai tones aren't difficult to pronounce either, in my view.
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