Thread: Best Book(s) for learning Thai

Can any of you recommend a good book or series of books for learning to read, write and speak Thai?

Thanks.

This for reading:

Manee and Friends

Go to your local shop for the speaking.

There are some recommendations (and links) in the Thai language forum

Most of the stuff from Benjawan Poomsan Becker (she married a yelaman) is good.

Especially the Thai For Beginners/Intermediate/Advanced Learners set of 3 books.

Emphasis is on learning written script from the start which is the best way to learn Thai.

Amazon.com: Benjawan Poomsan Becker: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle

Originally Posted by Looper

Most of the stuff from Benjawan Poomsan Becker (she married a yelaman) is good.

Especially the Thai For Beginners/Intermediate/Advanced Learners set of 3 books.

Emphasis is on learning written script from the start which is the best way to learn Thai.

Amazon.com: Benjawan Poomsan Becker: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle

Thanks. Would this be available in Thailand?

Can the powers to be move this to this forum please -https://teakdoor.com/learn-thai-language/

I am very sorry, I looked but did not see it.

I learned to read and write it with the alphabet books for Kindergarten. Easy, repetitive and fun. Especially when you think some 3 year old is doing the same thing. But must say from not keeping it up my reading is barely fair, and my writing needs a lot of work.

Originally Posted by aging one

I learned to read and write it with the alphabet books for Kindergarten. Easy, repetitive and fun. Especially when you think some 3 year old is doing the same thing. But must say from not keeping it up my reading is barely fair, and my writing needs a lot of work.

It's just a matter of doing it repetitively, AO.

Practice becomes instinct before long.

I first studied witha book, I think called Thai for beginners or Thai naturally, can't recall.
It focused on teaching reading writing as you built spoken language skills. It was an old book, maybe written in the 50s or 60s, hard bound in blue with no jacket.
Does anyone recall it?

Originally Posted by Rural Surin

It's just a matter of doing it repetitively, AO.

20 years ago they were building both the Don Muang Tollway and the Skytrain on Phahonyotin at the same time. I had to get home from AUA, some nights were 3 hours plus. But I could read signs in the jams. The first word ever was Ya, or medicine. Big green cross for context and there it was Yaw Ying, sala Ah. I was in heaven. Worked up to license plates and got Pratchuap Kiri Khan province one night, that was a good one.

What is,.......

Originally Posted by Looper

a yelaman

He is a German my friend. !

^Thank you AO. By the way (Looper) he’s not German. He’s an American (both her first and second husband are Americans). The girlfriend graduated in the same class at KKU with Ae (Benjawan).

If I knew back then what I know now learn how to read numbers in Thai/indian/Khmer then learn the constants and vowels after. If you can't read characters and remember them as being 1-9 then forget trying to learn how to read.

Originally Posted by S Landreth

^Thank you AO. By the way (Looper) he’s not German. He’s an American (both her first and second husband are Americans). The girlfriend graduated in the same class at KKU with Ae (Benjawan).

Thankyou SL I assumed he was a Yelaman by his surname and thought I had read that somewhere but obviously I had not.

If your GF/wife knows Ae please pass on my profound thanks for her great books.

Sisaket girlie also loved her book on Thai Idioms which we read together since it contains lots of funny similes and metaphors which SG thought it was bizarre but entertaining to be passing on to farangs through a publication.

Originally Posted by Looper

If your GF knows Ae please pass on my profound thanks for her great books.

I will and I am sure she’ll appreciate the (free ) plugs you’ve been giving her and her books [by the way she owns a publishing company (Paiboon Publishing: https://www.facebook.com/paiboonpublishing) and not all the books she sells are written by her].

https://www.facebook.com/benjawanpoomsan

Among those already mentioned, Teach Yourself Thai by David Smith is a good primer for learning the script.

RickThai

I learned writing and reading in thai from learnthaionline.com. It took me 2 weeks and I already could read newspapers (without understanding it haha). Cost quite a lot of money but if you are interested I can share my account which I already paid. Just send me a PM.

IMHO; learning to read Thai (and comprehend what you're reading) is a FAR sight easier than learning to speak clear Thai.

Sadly, the previous poster was NOT reading, he was just making the sounds correctly. If you have no idea what the fuck you're reading, how can you say you're reading? To me reading is comprehending what you see, not simply making the correct word sounds with not a clue as to what's comin' outta your mouth. That's why those programs which purport to get you "reading Thai" rapid, hi-speed or whatever are for the most part, bull shit. You hafta memorize a TON of Thai words to be able to read with any degree of comprehension.

My reading is leaps and bounds ahead of my spoken Thai. I usually spend a couple hours a day reading the newspaper and every month I buy the Thai versions of Maxim, FHM, Penthouse, Playboy, Stuff, Mix, Science Illustrated, National Geographic and one called "I Get English"... I know quite the shallow reading, but hey if you read about topics which interest you, you'd be surprised how much faster you can learn to read and comprehend stuff.

The last thing I do is wanna sit in a Thai language class and learn about "thai culture", "holidays in thailand", "a day in the life of someone in the middle of nowhere thailand", "the history of thailand according to the thais", etc. I'd rather bite out my own veins than go thru that kind of "indoctrination" from ANY thai teaching the language to a non-native speaker. That's why I passed on Benjawan's Thai for Advanced learners, it was so dated, and so out of touch with anything that it was worthless as tits on a tomcat to me..

True learning to read Thai does take some dedication and a healthy investment of time. The Thai "alphabet" does have 6-T's; ฐ, ฑ, ฒ, ถ, ท, ธ, 5-K's; ข, ฃ, ค, ฅ, ฆ, 4-S's; ซ, ศ, ษ, ส etc. right down the line, as well as 32 vowel sounds and 5 tone sounds represented by 4 tone marks. Still, it's NOT beyond the grasp of any foreigner who puts their mind to it.

The biggest drawback is your own motivation or lack thereof. Face it there're 67+ million Thais in this country who pretty much seem to be able to read Thai just fine. I'm damned sure it's a statistical impossibility that every last one of these people is smarter than you. Please note; it's not statistically impossible that out of the entire population of the world 1% of the people are smarter than you (that equates to about the population of this country). What is impossible is that every last one of those 1% is frickin' thai.

Reading is nothing more than memorizing groups of characters (interestingly enough called; words) and having that group of characters tied to a specific meaning in your head. It doesn't matter if you can pronounce the word with any degree of accuracy or not, because as a rule you read silently to yourself.

Christ I could tell the difference between what I call "the 6 cow words" in Thai long before I could hit the intonation or vowel lengths with any degree of accuracy. (FWIW; "the 6 cow words" are เขา, เข่า, เข้า & ขาว, ข่าว ข้าว; he/she/they/antler/mountain, knee, enter & white, news, rice).. I learned them by memorizing the differences in how they're written.

It ain't rocket science, it's reading Thai. If you have the proper motivation you can do it. Now be aware that reading thai and speaking clear thai are "whores from a different bar", whoops, sorry, got my idioms mixed up, I meant to say they're "horses of a different color". Reading thai isn't gonna help your thai pronunciation a bit, because rarely do you think of how a word is spelled when you're tryin to speak Thai to Thais. Still, reading Thai is a useful skill-set to have if you happen to live here..


Good Luck

Reading thai isn't gonna help your thai pronunciation a bit, because rarely do you think of how a word is spelled when you're tryin to speak Thai to Thais.

You might not but plenty of people do and given the tight grapheme to phoneme binding in Thai, learning to read can - for those with the relevant learning style/preferences - be enormously helpful for pronunciation.

I love it when people throw out "linguistic terms"!

For the people who aren't "cunning linguists" (such as myself) here're the definitions;
grapheme; the smallest semantically distinguishing unit in a written language, analogous to the phonemes of spoken languages.
phoneme; a basic unit of a language's phonology, which is combined with other phonemes to form meaningful units such as words or morphemes.

As I said, NOT being a cunning linguist I don't care what those words mean, because not knowing them didn't appear to hold me back from learning Thai.

Unfortunately there is NOT the tight grapheme to phoneme binding as alluded to by the poster known as "Zooheekock". In fact there is a HUGE amount of disparity between spoken Thai versus how it's really written. That's mostly because the Thai language of today is a total miss-mash hodge-podge mix of; ancient Thai, Cambodian, Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese and now a TON of English "loan words". Each of those languages when represented in Thai characters has it's own peculiar spelling quirks and often they're not pronounced anywhere close to how they're written. True Thai is closer between written and spoken pronunciation than say English; but that's because in English if we find a word from another language which has value for us, we steal it and make it our own. Thai is startin' to do this and there're a TON of English words in Thai as it's spoken today..

The exponential developments the language has gone thru via "chat-speak" clearly reflects this. Nowadays words are spelled to more closely mimic how they're pronounced in real life. An example is the question tag particle; ไหม which is now written (even in print media like magazines, newspapers) as มั้ย.

Thai is many many years overdue for a re-vamp as far as their written language. Like it or not, the thai youth of today is addressing this problem seeing as the powers that be (the dinosaurs entrusted with the preservation of the language) will not address it.

I've yet to run across a single non-native speaker who can speak something resembling semi-coherent semi-intelligible Thai who told me that the ability to read Thai improved their spoken Thai, and I've probably met hundreds and hundreds of Thai students. Conversely, I've met more than my fair share of really clear, concise well enunciated non-native Thai speakers who couldn't tell a กอ-ไก่ from a คอ-ควาย.

At least to me reading and speak are different animals. I wholeheartedly wish my spoken Thai was on par with my reading, but alas it's not.. Still, for the most part, once a Thai knows I'm speakin' Thai (even though it's horrifically American accented and errantly toned), I'm universally understood and rarely hafta repeat myself.

At the end of the day, what ever method works best for you is the one you need to pursue. What I ain't doin' is telling you how to go about learning Thai. I'm just relating what I did..

Good luck

Unfortunately there is NOT the tight grapheme to phoneme binding as alluded to by the poster known as "Zooheekock". In fact there is a HUGE amount of disparity between spoken Thai versus how it's really written. That's mostly because the Thai language of today is a total miss-mash hodge-podge mix of; ancient Thai, Cambodian, Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese and now a TON of English "loan words".

I didn't allude to anything. I said it. And the fact remains that if you know how a word is spelt in Thai, you have a good chance of pronouncing it correctly. There are some obvious exceptions when one moves from citation forms to regular spoken Thai, such as tone shifts, changes in the lengths of vowels, reduction of consonant clusters, and changes in some reduced forms and then there also, it is quite true, some ambiguities in spelling (for example, whether two consonants form a consonant cluster or whether they are separated by an unwritten vowel or the scope of a การันต์) which is why it’s a tight binding and not a perfect binding and why I said ‘is enormously helpful’ not ‘makes your pronunciation absolutely flawless’. Sometimes people think that some of the oddities of Thai, such as ทราย becoming ซาย, สรร becoming สัน and สรรพ becoming สับ are exceptions but these are rule-governed changes. You might not know the rules, or have any interest in them, or understand their application but they are there.

To check, in a very rough and ready way, I picked the first paragraphs of two stories on the front pages of Matichon and Thai Rath. Here they are:

หย่อมความกดอากาศต่ำกำลังแรงบริเวณประเทศเวียดน ามได้ เคลื่อนสู่ประเทศลาวแล้ว คาดว่าจะเคลื่อนตัวมาทางตะวันตกเข้ามาปกคลุมพื้นที่ต อนบนของภาคตะวันออก เฉียงเหนือและภาคเหนือในระยะ1-2วันนี้ ลักษณะเช่นนี้ทำให้ตอนบนของภาคเหนือและภาคตะวันออกเฉ ียงเหนือมีฝนตกหนาแน่น กับมีฝนตกหนักถึงหนักมากได้ บริเวณจังหวัดเชียงใหม่ เชียงราย ตาก พะเยา น่าน ลำปาง ลำพูน อุตรดิตถ์ เพชรบูรณ์ เลย หนองคาย และบึงกาฬ จึงขอให้ประชาชนบริเวณดังกล่าวระวังอันตรายจากฝนตกหน ักในระยะนี้

วันนี้ (29 ก.ค.56) นายสุเมธ สายทอง หน.อุทยานแห่งชาติเขาแหลมหญ้า หมู่เกาะเสม็ด อ.เมือง จ.ระยอง เปิดเผยถึงความคืบหน้า เหตุน้ำมันรั่วไหลลงในทะเล บริเวณห่างจากชายฝั่งท่าเรือมาบตาพุดไปทางทิศตะวันออ กเฉียงใต้ประมาณ 20 กิโลเมตร ว่า ล่าสุดคราบน้ำมันได้ลอยมาถึงอ่าวพร้าว ซึ่งอยู่ทางตะวันตกเฉียงเหนือของเกาะเสม็ดแล้ว เมื่อช่วงกลางดึกที่ผ่านมา ส่งผลให้หาดทรายมีสีดำ และส่งกลิ่นเหม็น ตลอดแนวร่วม 400 เมตร รวมทั้งน้ำทะเลที่เคยใส เต็มไปด้วยคราบน้ำมันแล้ว

For someone who knew only the basics of Thai orthography (there you go – another word for you to look up), in the Matichon story, the only words which I would imagine might cause a problem are บริเวณ, ลักษณะ, อุตรดิตถ์, เพชรบูรณ์ and อันตราย and of those, only อุตรดิตถ์ and เพชรบูรณ์ seem really confusing, but then they’re names which people would probably know and names are often, I admit, unusually difficult in Thai.

In Thai Rath, อุทยาน, ชาติ, เสม็ด, เหตุ, บริเวณ (again) and เมตร look like they might be difficult but three of those are relatively common and people would learn these very early on. Other than those, there is a high degree of predictability in how the words are pronounced so for someone who, as I said, had the relevant learning preferences, this knowledge would certainly be useful. It’s not for everybody but it’s the height of narcissism to think that the fact that you don’t do it means that nobody does.

I've yet to run across a single non-native speaker who can speak something resembling semi-coherent semi-intelligible Thai who told me that the ability to read Thai improved their spoken Thai

We haven’t met and thankfully I can’t imagine any circumstances in which that might happen but now you know of at least one.

Man Zooheekock you just won't give it a rest will you?

Don't mis-remember what I'm tryin' to say. I just am relating my own personal experience about reading thai and how it hasn't helped my normal everyday spoken pronunciation; except when I read thai out loud. I mean face it, how often do you do that?

I didn't say being able to read Thai wouldn't help you pronounce the words better when you're actually reading Thai. That's almost a given, especially once you understand the tone pronunciation rules in Thai. I said I could identify words by their components long before I could replicate them with any degree of accuracy when speaking. That was just by memorizing the differences in what appeared to me to be similarly constructed words. I'm NOT sayin' that's the way to do it, I just said I learned that way.

I also said I haven't found anyone who ever stated, "Man once I could read Thai, my every day spoken Thai pronunciation went off the charts!" It's just something I haven't ran into after talking to many hundreds of non-native learners of the Thai language.

I dunno why we seem at odds over differences in personal experiences about learning the language.

I'll make sure to mark you down in the "once I could read my spoken Thai went up" column. There's a first time for everything I guess. .

At the end of the day, what ever works for you is the "right way" to go about it. I'm just relating what I've seen, heard, etc.

Unfortunately it seemed that our dialog dragged this off topic.. Sorry about that...

Yeah, breaks my heart too that we can't meet up..