Thread: Learn to read Thai in a day!

Originally Posted by The Fresh Prince

Yep, agree with that, it's not so hard as it appears. Reading now is becoming natural. not in a day, for me its been about a year I think since this thread started but its coming together. Keep practicing.

Yes, about a year of reading everything you see... buses, menus, roadsigns, shop fronts, posters, numberplates and it becomes natural. Plus of course practicing with magazines and books.

Good on ya.

I mainly learned from the Benjawan Poomsan Becker bookseries.

"ve been trying with this, thanks

You can say that again William!

I learnt to read with an AUA book, bought from their main office. Quite a few years back. I learned in one month - 1/2 an hour a day. It's really easy if you study.

Originally Posted by Norton

Originally Posted by thethaireport

I've tried a lot of software. thai2english .com is by far the best in my opinion. It's $30USD or something like that but there's a free trial you can test. I don't know the developer; just a very happy customer!

Their free online dictionary is quite good as well.

Thai to English dictionary, translation & transliteration - Thai2English

.
It seems designed more for a Thai speaker.

Originally Posted by zingerhk

I want to try this, but it is quite expensive!!

Go to any bookshop and look for an orange book by benjawan poomsan becker. It should see you reading in no time.

299b I think.

Originally Posted by Chairman Mao

Go to any bookshop and look for an orange book by benjawan poomsan becker. It should see you reading in no time. 299b I think.

I've got that one if he wants to buy it fro me. It will have to be 399bt though because I've filled in all the writing sections, so all the hard work has been done for you.

I see you've read her Business logic for Thailand book too.

Hi,

I went to school in Chiang Rai (AUA) for 6 months and did "one on one" learning Thai with a Thai teacher. Well worth the money I spent. But I did a lot of studying at home using books and the great website "LearningThai.com" - Learning Thai the Easy Way
You will find everything you need to learn the Thai language here, and there are sections where you can click on a button and hear the word spoken in Thai (you need Adobe Flash enabled) and this is very handy when studying on your own.
I found a good way to learn the various sounds of the consonants and vowels is to pick each letter and find a commonly used word that includes that letter, write the word in Thai, then the word in English, then the sound that the Thai letter makes by using an English word which can only be pronounced one way, this is important as some words in English can be be pronounced in several ways.
For example : The Thai vowel อิ - กิน - "gin" with a hard g - as in "pin"
This way you not only learn the sound the vowel makes but a handy word as well.
It worked for me, and I was 48 years old when I started learning the Thai language.

Hi, I'm the author of what used to be called "Read Thai in a Day"...

Well, maybe one day was a little ambitious. We do it in two days now. The first day is basically to "download" (or upload) the letters into your head, The Matrix style; and the second day is to practice and consolidate what you've learnt. The second day seems to make all the difference.

It's not for everybody. Some people prefer the plain-and-simple brute-force method of just repeating things over and over again until it sticks. I'm lazy. I prefer to find a short-cut, and that's what the 'Rapid' Method is.

BTW, even for those people who do study the Thai reading system the conventional way, they say it's still very difficult to figure out the tones. Some people who can already read have attended my workshop to understand this aspect of the Thai language (read my separate post "English is a Tonal Language too").

Please visit the website and sign up to the free Starter Course. You'll get a daily 10-minute lesson by email for 15 days. You'll learn to read quite a bit in that time.

The underlying principle for the 'Rapid' Method is that it's always easier to remember a story (especially if it's visual, as in a movie) than to try to memorize facts by repetition alone.

Some repetition is required even with 'accelerated' approaches, but only two or three times - compared with dozens of times using a more conventional approach. The other advantage is that what you remember sticks indefinitely, maybe with a quick refresher after a few months.

If you learn by rote then most of what you might have memorized is lost if you don't keep up your studies continuously.

I use boys, girls and ladyboys as a way of remembering the 'class' of each letter. You can use the same trick to remember the gender of German or French words. The concept of 'class' has no meaning, so is easily forgotten or confused.

But if you associate a personality (or better yet, a sexual) characteristic with each letter then it's a piece of cake. The chicken is Thai is male cockerel (or rooster if you're American).
This quickly and easily reminds you that ก (which kinda looks like a bird with a beak) is a male letter - and it sounds like the "ck" inside the word "chicken".

How about บ, which looks like the English "U"? I have a picture of a U-Boat captain, looking out of the funnel of his submarine. This reminds you instantly - from the shape of the letter alone - that บ is a male letter (captains are usually male) and that it sounds like "b" as in "boat".

So it doesn't take long to learn the entire alphabet, with its sounds and 'classes'. I then extend the story I've been weaving with all the alphabet characters to explain how the tones work in Thai.

But that's for another bedtime. It's lessons 13 and 14 in the Rapid Starter Course... Go sign up and check it out for yourself and let us know what you think.

Sorry, I forgot to add a link to my website: www.LearnThaiOnline.com. You can watch the video and learn 13 letters in ten minutes, sign up for a free 'Starter' course and try out the method for yourself.

You can follow the course online in your own time. It can be done in two half-days a week apart, but most people do it slowly: one page a day (15 mins) for two months.

Or if you're lazy, come to one of the Rapid Read Thai intensive workshops.

Upcoming Read Thai Workshops:

October 10-14, Chiang Mai - Mon-Fri 10am-3pm
October 22-23, Ko Samui – intensive weekend
Oct 31-Nov 4, Pattaya - "wakeboard week"
November 26-27, Pattaya – intensive weekend
December 5-9, Bangkok - Mon-Fri 10am-3pm

Click here for more details and to register.

Originally Posted by rapidll

That's just brilliant.Hope you do well.

Peter, I read your (deleted?) post and tried to reply but there must have been some glitch

I'm afraid you've completely missed the point when you say that it's important to learn to read Thai the same way as Thai children learn, using the Thai system, the Thai convention and the Thai names for the letters...

Try looking at it from another perspective. Let's say you are Thai learning to read English. Is it really necessary to know the letters aitch, ay, pee and wai to read "happy"? It makes more sense to a Thai person to read it as, say, hua [head], aepbeun [apple], poh [father] and eemayl. How about a German word "zeitgeist" or a French word "l'amour"...? Do you know the German or French names of all the letters in the alphabet? More importantly, did you need to in order to read and understand these words?

Whatever you or I say, the proof is in the pudding. By following the minimalist 'Rapid' approach, my students have learnt to read (albeit slowly and without much understanding) in about 16 hours and be able to pronounce all the words accurately with the correct tone.

I think most people who follow the conventional "the way the Thais learn" approach take around 150 hours over 3-4 months to read passably well, but still struggle to figure out the tones and are still confused about many subtle aspects of the Thai language. And they read even more slowly than those who've completed the 16-hour 'Rapid' course.

For those people who are diligent and self-disciplined enough to study alone, the course is available online also. There are also other fairly good courses, like HighSpeedThai and LearnThaiPodcast and Its4Thai. Often it's a matter of taste: if you enjoy immersing yourself in mountains of material and focusing on a more aural (as opposed to visual) approach then you will probably prefer these other courses.

The 'Rapid' approach takes a minimalistic "less-is-more" route, designed to fit into your busy lifestyle - usually not more than 15 minutes per day, but focused in such a way that you can achieve fluency in a fraction of the time... with minimal effort.

It's true that you need to adopt a new paradigm of learning and set of conventions. I have trained Thai teachers to provide follow on conversational lessons by continuing the 'Rapid' approach. Not many teachers can do it.

(In reply to your latest post, it's completely irrelevant whether you can spell a word out to a Thai person or not. The point of the 'Rapid' approach is simply to be able to read Thai and use this as a basis for developing your understanding and conversational ability. Along the way, as part of building your vocabulary, you will learn the names of the letters - at least for the letters that have modern, meaningful names, like chicken, child, soldier. But it really isn't neccessary.

There are only three occasions where you might need to ask for a word to be spelled out verbally: 1. When you're not sure you've heard a word correctly and you want clarification. 2. If you've heard a new word and you want to know how it's spelled so you can look it up - alternatively, just ask the Thai person to write it down for you. 3. You need to know how to spell someone's name, because these are usually fiendishly obscure. I think you'll agree that for a beginning or even intermediate student these situations are highly unlikely...)