LEARNING THAI!

Greetings (just in case anyone is reading this!).

My name is David and I am trying to learn Thai (yet again!). I am handicapped in learning a Language by being British and thick……..and very lazy.

So I will probably give up as usual – so I thought that whilst I still have the interest I would put these “Flashcards” of the Thai Consonants on the Web. Mainly so I have a spare copy of them, but also just in case someone else finds them useful. (The vowels are being worked on………)

As I do not enjoy learning in front of a PC, the idea of these “Flashcards” is that they get printed out (I have used sheets of pre-cut Business Cards). One side has purely Thai, and the other has the English “Answers”. The intention is that I will continue to look at them even when I only have 5 minutes to spare…………….. we will see!

At the moment I find it quite relaxing copying the Flash Cards out to practice my writing – not sure if I should find this worrying.

I am sure that their are other versions of these on the Web, but buggered if I could find anything useful – everything seems to be all singing and dancing aimed at being used online. I will admit that several online sites do help with the pronunciation, but I figure that I can brush up on this next time I am in Thailand with the nearest “Santa’s little helper” whilst drinking away the afternoon.

The transliterations are from the Thai-English Dictionary edited by Benjawan Poomsan Becker and published by Paiboon Publishing (ISBN 1-887521-14-3). This is effectively 3 Dictionaries - as well as the English to Thai (and vice verce) it also includes Thai Transliteration into English and Thai script (i.e. you can look up Kwaai in English and see that this means “buffalo” whilst also reading the word in Thai as ควาย).

PLEASE NOTE HOWEVER that these “Flashcards” do NOT include the tone marks on the English Transliteration. This is for two reasons, firstly that I do not always “read sounds” exactly the same way as indicated and secondly I do not know what all the “English” symbols actually mean!

The Thai script DOES of course include all the tone marks.

I figure that if I have to learn tone marks that I might as well start with the Thai. For help with the letter sounds / pronunciation I found www.Learningthai.com useful.

The “names” for each letter are from the Thai Dictionary. I take them to be the equivalent of the English “A is for Apple” etc and are the standard Thai letter names used for learning Thai. You will see that each of these “names” is preceded by a word ending in AW (Eg for G it reads Gaw Gai – where Gai is the word for Chicken). I take the “AW” word to be a cross between the equivalent of “G is for” (even though it does not actually say this) and just an aid to help remember the letter sound. I figure that if it is good enough to be used in Thailand to teach kids how to read, then it is ok for me to use.

The LARGE Thai letters have been typed using “Comic Sans MS” font (as for my computer this seems to give the clearest individual characters) however for the full Thai words I have had to use “Tahoma” font in order that the various Thai tone marks appear in the correct places in relation to each letter. If you look very closely you will find subtle differences between these two fonts – but for my present limited purposes I don’t think it is overly material – I am trying(!) to copy the LARGE Thai letters when practising my Thai.

I am presently learning the letters firstly by rote (ABC etc) and then mixing the cards up to then try and identify them at random. The numbers on the left of each card are those of each letter as they appear in the Thai Alphabet, so I can easily put them back into the ABC order.

The stars on the left of each card indicate whether the Consonants are High, Mid or Low – hopefully their positioning on the Flashcards is self explanatory.

The small x marks on the Thai letters numbered 3 & 5 indicate that my dictionary tells me that they are now obsolete. I have no idea how a letter can get obsolete - but I have included them as I intend to learn them just in case I have read this wrong - or they get re-introduced by popular demand!

Depending on how I get on with all this I MAY make some Flashcards for the Thai words I am trying to learn. At the moment my vocab is somewhat restricted to that which is only useful in strictly limited “social” areas in Thailand! I am also trying to make a list of the sort of words used when writing or receiving E-mails to and from Thailand. We will see how I get on.

My ambition is that by the end of 2005 I will be reading, writing and speaking Thai with the ability of the average Thai two year old! Hope springs eternal! 

As I forgot to get myself a Thai Keyboard on my last trip to the LOS, I am using http://www.learningthai.com/thaikeyboard/index.html whenever I want to type in Thai Characters. Unfortunately you need good eyesight. At the moment this is not slowing down my Thai typing speeds!

The Website www.Thai2English.com has a useful Thai English (and vice verce) online dictionary, plus it can “decode” any garbled Thai script that did not survive a trip by E-mail.

I am trying to take things one step at a time – whilst I am quite optimistic that (given time and effort) I will be able to amass a reasonable vocab purely by “rote” learning – the thought of trying to understand the rules of grammar and tones etc and then to be able to recognise them in written form scares and depresses the shit out of me – especially as I am the sort of person for whom explanations about exactly WTF a pronoun or an adverb is goes in one ear and straight out the other, barely touching the sides.