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Goals for 2015 - Thai and Sanskrit | ||
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| Lampang Newbie Thailand Joined 3471 days ago 5 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Sanskrit | Message 1 of 3 01 January 2015 at 5:22am | IP Logged |
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My first post, started as part of the TAC 2015 - Rare Languages Team Thread.
My goals for 2015 are: 1. Get my Thai to a solid B2/B2+ in all skills. I've been living in Thailand for long enough that not already being at this level is a source of considerable embarrassment but that is the past. It's a little hard to guess what my current level is and there are no standardized tests which would shed light on this but if I had to guess, I'd say that my reading is B2 already and my other skills fluctuate between A2 and B1+, depending on the skill (from worst to best: writing, speaking, listening, reading) and the material (good: technical stuff, especially anything about politics. Bad: low register/slang/day-to-day conversational stuff). I actually started with a big push on Thai in November so that my New Year's resolution would simply be to carry on as I had been; other than a ten-day hiatus over the holiday period, it's been reasonably successful and I feel fairly confident that I'll be able to reach my goals. 2. Complete both volumes of Thomas Egenes's Introduction to Sanskrit. Not sure what that would translate to in terms of CEFR levels. A1? Not that high? This was a recent decision. I've had an interest in Buddhism for a little while and have toyed with learning Pali (the scriptural language of Theravada Buddhism) but decided to go with Sanskrit. The two languages are very closely related and the usual progress is Sanskrit then Pali, plus there is a lot more material around to support learning Sanskrit. A second reason for taking this on is that both languages have had a significant influence on Thai; a lot of technical/high-register language is derived from Sanskrit or Pali, in much the same way that Latin and Greek influence English. I'm not sure how much of a mountain this is to climb. It's clearly a hideously complicated language but in many ways, it plays to my strengths much better than does Thai. I really like the idea of learning a language with this kind of complexity, though one which is (seemingly/allegedly) highly rational. I've just started learning Devanagari and the order/arrangement of the letters is so fantastically sensible that they just seem naturally to fall into place. 3. Not a goal as such but I may devote some time to learning Northern Thai/kam meuang, depending on how the other two goals go. This is a dialect of Thai and it's widely spoken where I live, though everyone also speaks Central Thai (the national language). The grammar is, as far as I know, the same as Central Thai but the vocabulary is different and there are some differences in the phonology (6 tones, for example, presumably because the 5 in Central Thai just aren't enough of a headache.) It also has its own alphabet, though this is now only found in some religious contexts (it was traditionally engraved on palm leaves) and in a few other unusual places (university departments, etc.) Being realistic, though, I think this will have to wait until next year. Partly, I suspect that I won't have time and partly I want to get more confident in my Standard Thai before I start worrying about other variants. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 3938 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes  Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 2 of 3 01 January 2015 at 5:33am | IP Logged |
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Very interesting! I look forward to following your progress!
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lampang Newbie Thailand Joined 3471 days ago 5 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Sanskrit | Message 3 of 3 01 January 2015 at 5:57am | IP Logged |
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Some of the materials I'm using:
NHK have a daily 15-minute podcast/news bulletin in Thai. This has the considerable advantage that NHK provide a transcript with each day's news. VOA have a half-hour Thai-language podcast/news bulletin. Unfortunately, you're on your own with this one. Glossika I'm busy building an adobe house at the moment, which I do from dawn to lunch (after which it gets too hot) so I have several hours a day of what is effectively dead-time. That gives me time to listen to each of the podcasts 3 times through (which gives about 2 1/4 hours of listening) and maybe an hour of Glossika. I also do 45-60 minutes of exercise in the afternoon, during which I do Glossika, too. I've been trying to do a couple of hours of practice at home. Most recently, this has involved recording myself and then using Praat to compare this against native speakers, trying (though mostly failing) to get my pronunciation in line with theirs. (For those who follow Thai politics, I've been copying Nattawut Saigua - he has exceptionally clear pronunciation - and John Winyu). I have tried to concentrate on tones but I also look at some of the other features of my speech, though I'm not sure how fruitful this has been. GTH films sometimes have Thai subtitles so those are always useful and I watch the odd soap opera. Reading comes from newspapers (online), a fair dose of Facebook (political stuff) and novels. Plus Anki, obviously. What is lacking is practice in productive skills. I need to start doing more writing, which I do almost none of at the moment, and more speaking, perhaps through language exchanges. Edited by Lampang on 01 January 2015 at 6:04am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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