Learning and Speaking Thai

Ideas on how to learn to read and write Thai would be most helpful.

I can learn a bit on how to speak it listening to people, but reading or writing I think requires formal education.

I feel rather disconnected not being able to read signs, screens on the ATM, etc.

Any ideas on these questions would be most appreciated.

Best Regards,
KB

Sent you a PM...

The more Thai you learn, the less you will want Thais to know you know what is being said; and the less you will want to use it. Just an observation. That said, there are some threads on the subject which discuss what you want to know in depth.

My guess is that papaguido has you covered with the real way of how to go about getting your driver's license. Cheers!

"The more Thai you learn, the less you will want Thais to know you know what is being said; and the less you will want to use it."
I used that trick a few times in Taiwan many moons ago. Nowadays, I seem to have a 6th sense at knowing when the shopkeeper is trying to pull one over on me.....which seems to be rare anyway. But if there's a pregnant pause in the shopkeeper's answer to my question (in Thai) "How much is this contraption?", I usually go elsewhere.
I find it more annoying when I ask a question in Thai and the shopkeeper answers in English because he/she wants to practice using their English.
I know many people will take exception to this, but I find most shopkeepers and market vendors give me the same price they give my wife. If you know some Thai and want to buy something at the market, spot someone who is in the process of buying (let's say cukes)....and ask the person buying how much he/she paid for the veggie.

I agree it is helpful to speak Thai when negotiating as it immediately establishes the fact that you are not some gullible tourist/newbie (I always start off in English, then switch to Thai). Although I am frequently complimented on how clearly I speak Thai (as opposed to the polite "you speak Thai well"), as Parrot mentioned, it does get rather annoying when they give you the deer in the road stare if you screw up a word ever so slightly. You may feel frustrated that they are not trying to meet you half-way as we frequently must do to understand their broken English and unfinished words (not enunciating the final consonant, using the wrong verb tense or adding "ing", or using an "l" instead of an "r",for examples). Even more frustrating is when you state what you want or respond to their question absolutely clearly and correctly, but they wait for your wife to say exactly what you just said - as if you had said nothing at all or were not even in the room. Those are the times (and there will be many) when you may just say "f*k it" and go back to letting the wife handle all interactions unless you are out solo.

Just my two baht.

" Those are the times (and there will be many) when you may just say "f*k it" and go back to letting the wife handle all interactions unless you are out solo."

The problem with letting the wife handle all the interactions, is most wives don't ask the questions that most husbands want to know: like: how many liters of fuel does this truck hold? what's the gas mileage on this beast? how much insulation does this refrigerator have? what's the difference between a regular ac and an inverter ac? how often do I have to change the filter on my water filter and where do I buy them when I need them? what's the difference between a 2 stroke and a 4 stroke weed wacker? why does my 220v power dip to 170v at night and what are you going to do about it?

No offense to the female half of the equation, but there are more important things in life than style/color/price.

The major impetus to my finally learning enough Thai to survive on my own was situations exactly like these. I know more than a few handfuls of expats who live here totally dependent on their wives to handle all negotiations. If it works for you, fine.

When we're out an about buying major items (like appliances), I give my wife the opportunity to ask her color/style/etc questions, then she gives me the opportunity to ask mine. When we walk out of the store, she's happy.....I'm happy.

My Thai is slowly improving and still limited but one of the things that I find frustrating is when I do say something clearly and distinctly in Thai the local will repeat exactly what I've said back to me. I seem to get that a lot. Perhaps I'm not speaking as well as I think I am.

My favorite is after speaking with a Thai merchant or whatever for 5 or 10 minutes, they then ask if I can speak Thai. Sometimes I say no just to see what their reaction. Usually, there is none, of course. Hmmm.

Well, one thing you do learn here is that there are no "stupid" questions, they're just simple conversation most of the time.

Such as when you're riding your bike through the village, and people keep asking you, "Are you riding your bike?" "Yep, I'm bike-riding." Smile. OK...got it. (He's riding his bike.)

"Where you going?" (Pai nai/sai?) Bothered me in the beginning, until I realized it was "just conversational." Answer: I'm going out. I'm going over there. Whatever. Doesn't matter.

But parrot summed it up perfectly for me. I wanted to talk sometimes. I wanted to ask some questions myself. I wanted to talk to the locals.

One thing that many people don't realize when they first come here is: You don't just "pick up" Thai very much as one goes along and lives here.

It is not French or Spanish, or even Tagalog or Bhasa Indonesia. It is not Romanized, so no dictionary use in the beginning. It is TONAL, a whole new universe of inflection and meaning, and the separation of those.

In short, it takes a strong decision, an act of will, to just do it one day, to commit to it, either by taking a class like AUA, hiring a private tutor, or for the very bright -- and I've seen it done -- buying Thai language DVDs and seriously getting into them. Then, practice, practice, practice, until one day you start feeling comfortable with it.

Not easy, but well worth it IMO. And of course, a personal decision.

I picked it from everyday interactions which may explain the clarity. I do screw up sometimes, but warn them I may not be saying [insert word] correctly so they can make the effort to understand that word. A dictionary obviously goes a long way and the best are the one's with 3 sections: Thai, English, and phonetic. I'll try to find my old dictionary and provide name/title. It's awesome. I really need to get off my @55 and learn more reading/writing. I really, really want to understand law books and write things like contracts. That for sure is not my wife's forte.

Very impressive, KD; I know very few people who have learned Thai this way. BTW, how long did it take you to get conversational?

I think the best small dictionary like this is the red, white, and blue once, by Banjawan Poomsan Becker, published by Paiboon Publishing.

You can order it online and see other books in the series at http://www.thailao.com/resources.html

Most people underestimate how significant tone is, and are puzzled when it seems, as KD put it, they are not trying to meet you half way. But a mistake in tone can make it a completely different word, and even though it may sound similar to you, it is like apples, and axle grease to a Thai.

Of all the methods of learning Thai, some of which emphasize phonetic speaking, and some of which encourage learning the written language very early, the most fundamental requirement is listening. Second is some honest feedback about your sound. Reading can't be started until you can at least distinguish the tones, and so the repetition of the vowel sounds with all five tones is helpful.

And one thing I haven't seen mentioned is how difficult it is to learn Central Thai here in Isaan. The sound is very different, as are many of the tones, not to mention the vocabulary. This being my second stint up here, I feel like my Thai skills are in a state of arrested development...and it's a waste of time to learn only Lao/Issan, unless you never plan to go anywhere else in Thailand.

Reading is not difficult, with practice. For me, spelling is a nightmare, and I know I'll never master it in my lifetime. I learned the alphabet in 1997, but really never made the leap to being able to read until I could understand spoken Thai fairly well. It's kind of a bootstrap thing: hard to read if you can't speak, and hard to learn to speak if you can't read.

These days, I have to think hard for a minute if I see a less common consonant used, as most of the everyday signage you see is comprised of a small subset of the consonants. If I see, for example, ญ instead of ย, in a word I don't know, it breaks my concentration, and slows my reading down a lot.

Day-to-day, my life is sometimes hilarious, because, being Filipino, my wife looks Thai, and people always look to her as if to say, "What is this fool talking about?". Then I give them my pat answer, "My wife is Filipino, and can not speak Thai". Sometimes this confuses the hell out of them, and they ask her, in Thai, if this is so. Then they get all funny, and make a joke that I must be Thai, and she is farang. Only once in a while, do I get the feeling that they aren't even TRYING to understand me, fear-driven, and horrified to have to try and communicate with a farang. Sometimes, when I'm in a less cheerful mood, I give up, and move on, but mostly, I hang in there, and they eventually get it.

I, too, get 'chaat' frequently, rather than the usual 'geng mak', so I know it's not just me.

[Ditto @Sateev's post who posted while I was typing.]

Well, that would be prior to meeting the Mrs. who spoke ZERO English when we met. So, I'd say 2000-2002-ish or about 2-3 years of a lot of asking "what does [insert Thai word] mean" or "how do you say [insert English word]" or "what is the difference between [insert two similar in meaning Thai words]". My motivation was (what else?) an ex-girlfriend and the rose-colored life with her I envisioned if we could just understand each other better. The more I understood, the less I wanted to be in that relationship.

Once one gets over the hump of TRYING to force the correct tones and sounds which sounds to a Thai somewhat robotic or as if you are reciting syllables from a dictionary, and learns to relax and just speak as naturally as one speaks English (it's ok to stress tones to convey intent: YOU want this? or You want THIS?), it gets really easy. Another thing to remember is to MISPRONOUNCE the same words they mispronounce so they understand you clearly (it's "aye" not "ice", for example, or "Suhkumwit" not Sukumvit"). Careful that many words may also be pronounced or abbreviated differently depending on where the speaker or listener is from within Thailand, which means YOU may also need to pronounce or abbreviate those words the same way - even if you know it's not what you thought was the correct way ("khang-nai baan" versus "nai baan", for example which means "inside [the] house"). I find Bangkok Thai is sooooooo much easier to understand than Thai spoken by someone from someplace along the borders where Thai is essentially just the less popular language spoken in everyday life. You'd be surprise to discover just how much upcountry Thais mangle the Thai language. Sort of like what the Brits did to American English.

I'll stop here because I may be rambling.

My experience with tones:

Before I cracked the code, if I were to ask my wife a question in Thai or ask her the meaning of a particular word in Thai, much more often than not, she'd not understand what I was saying/asking.....much to my annoyance, because as far as I was concerned, 'she should understand what I'm saying!'. (Wrong assumption!)



Once I cracked the tone code (it is a code!), that problem mostly went away. When I ask the wife the meaning of a word/sentence, she generally understands what I'm asking. She can't always give me a good answer, but at least she understands what I'm asking.

Here's some incentive to learn basic reading:
There are thousands....many thousands of storefront signs in Thai....that as you would expect, tell you what that particular business does.
or
How do you know that one of the main roads in Bangkok isn't called Rama IV (like the streetsigns all say), but Phra-Ram See (as the Thai signs say). If you tell the taxi driver to go to Rama 4, he'll likely not understand. If you say Phra-Ram See, he'll probably understand.
or
Let's say your wife/gf was nice enough to teach you one of the not-so-nice ways to refer to that thing between your legs - ควย khuay. Now let's say you meet up with a nice Thai girl whose nickname is กล้วย Gluay. Unless you have magic ears, you'd be hard pressed to hear the difference in the G and the K sounds between the two words. So it basically comes down to a difference in tones......that 12" curved possession of a banana tree has a falling tone, while that lesser thing has no tone. Mess it up with that girl, and she'll get the wrong idea. I know.....been there, done that.

Don't anyone get the wrong idea that my Thai is much good.....it's not......but I can usually do what I need to do on my own downtown/restaurant/airport/government office when the need arises. I have to say, though, that being able to read really does make you much more cognizant of what's what in Udon/Thailand.

parrot wrote: "I know.....been there, done that."

I guess the worst gaff I ever made was mispronouncing the Thai word for "snow". I meant to say "hee ma" but unfortunately it came out "hee maa".

หีหมา (hee maa) = dog vagina.............I cleaned that up a bit from its true vulgar meaning.

Shado wrote:parrot wrote: "I know.....been there, done that."

I guess the worst gaff I ever made was mispronouncing the Thai word for "snow". I meant to say "hee ma" but unfortunately it came out "hee maa".

หีหมา (hee maa) = dog vagina.............I cleaned that up a bit from its true vulgar meaning.

A decade ago, I made the gaff of asking a gay waiter in an ice cream shop for more d*ck (sounds like bananna). He and my then-girlfriend were cracking up as they asked me to repeat it again and again. Even invited some of the other staff over. I was clueless, but it was darn funny when they let me in on it.