I recently had an opportunity to take a two-day Thai Language course, and despite my promise to never learn another tonal language, I decided to attend. I actually had three compelling reasons to take it – I was bored, the course was free, and I wanted an excuse to dive into the Thai book I bought way back in November.
Obviously, a two-day course (covering ten lessons) is not the best way to learn a language. We went super fast, and had little time to absorb the information. If I were to guess, I would say I retained 7-10% of what we learned.
Not only was the setting not great, but also the approach that we took made it difficult to follow. Since the class was ‘Basic Conversational Thai’, we only focused on speaking. For me, this was difficult not only because I could not associate the words with the script, but also because there did not seem to be a standard system of romanization (which proved to be one of the biggest frustrations).
For the language learners out there, I thought I’d post about my experience, and note some observations about writing, speaking, and listening.
Writing and Romanization
There is a standard romanization system for the Thai Language, but it is not used by all publications/websites, which made the learning process quite difficult at times.** On several occasions, I discovered typos in the material, and observed my teacher struggling with the romanization while writing on the board. This lack of standardization gave me a new found appreciation for pinyin (the Chinese romanization system) – the fact that instructors around the world all use the same system (save the small minority using Wade-Giles), makes the learning process much easier…even if that standard system has some flaws.
So, given this challenge, I decided that if I want to continue my studies, I’ll have to learn the script. This is not a big deal, because not only will it be useful, but I actually find it to be really interesting. I actually tried to learn the consonants a month or so ago, but was too busy with work to continue.
Speaking
While I was hesitant to learn another tonal language at first, I later decided that it could be viewed as a return on my investment with Chinese (I am not a linguist, so that might be total BS). As with Mandarin, the tones are very tricky. There is a high tone (kinda like Mandarin’s 1st), rising tone (kinda like Mandarin’s 2nd), middle tone (Mandarin’s 1st, but low), low tone, and falling tone (kinda like Mandarin’s 4th). As with Mandarin, there are several words with the same sound, but different tone. In some cases, using the wrong tone can be really problematic. For example, the words for ‘far’ and ‘near’ actually have the same sound, but differ in tone. You can imagine how this could cause confusion.
So far, it seems that my process with Thai will be similar to learning Mandarin – tones will come after the sounds. Personally, I find some of the sounds to be quite difficult. On several occasions, my teacher simply could not understand some of the words I was trying to say. This was partly because I did not get enough exposure to the different sounds, and partly because the romanization system we used did not really make sense to me.
As for the sentence structure, it does not seem to be that difficult. Unlike Mandarin, Thai sentence structures are quite similar to English. Of course this is not always the case, but almost every time I crafted a sentence from my vocabulary list, my teacher said it was fine.
Listening
I hope this does not offend my Thai readers, but I have to say it – Thai is not the best sounding language. It is fine in a normal conversation, but public announcements and arguments can be quite irritating (but not as bad as Vietnamese). I am not sure why this is, but it could have to do with the use of particles. See, in Thai, you use a particle at the end of a sentence to indicate politeness. For women it is ‘ka’ and for men it is ‘krop’. So, it is possible that the repetitive use of rising-tone ‘ka’ can get old after a while. Again, please don’t be offended!
As for learning the language, I have a couple of comments. First, it is much easier (for me, at least) to distinguish the tones. When I hear Thai, the tones stand out a lot more than in mandarin, and after only two days I can tell you which word is which tone (though I probably can’t repeat it!). For some learning Mandarin, this might seem silly…it very well could be the case that you have no problem hearing the tonal differences in a Mandarin sentences (comments?), but for me, it is not always obvious (and it does not help that certain words change tone depending on context).
Finally, to help those learning a language – I find it very useful to start learning questions words first. For example, I might not understand an entire sentence, but if I can identify “how”, “why”, or “how much”, I can get some idea of what the person is asking. If I ask to repeat, and then hear “plane ticket” and “how much”, then I have an idea of how to answer. This is something I learned from my first year of Mandarin, and from speaking to people that are learning English. In the first case, my Professor would ask us a series of questions, and intentionally try to through us off (for example, asking ‘how do you go there?’, instead of ‘where do you go?’). In the second, I noticed that people struggling with English will often respond to a question with a completely different answer, because they never caught the key question word.
Anyway, that was my little encounter with Thai. I figure I’d keep going because it is interesting, fun, and I have already given it 16 or so hours, haha!
**More on Romanization from Wikipdia:
The Royal Thai General System of Transcription (RTGS) is the official system for rendering Thai language words in the Latin alphabet, published by The Royal Institute of Thailand. It is used in road signs and government publications, and is the closest thing to a standard of transcription for Thai, though its use by even the government is inconsistent.
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