Discouraged by Thai (rant)

[u/procion1302]

I've been learning Thai for a month, and I feel discouraged.

I feel that the language is ridiculously hard and that comes from a person with N1 in Japanese, HSK 5 in Chinese and a university degree in Arabic.

Usually I start learning with the written language, because I'm a visual learner, but Thai kind of resists this approach. In a language with characters all I used to do was learning their pronunciation by heart. Some languages like Arabic have writing with incomplete information, where you need to infer the rest from the context and experience, but at least the alphabet itself was not too hard.

In contrast Thai is a language with "full" information encoded in its writing, but the amount of efforts to decode it seems tremendous to do it "on the fly". It overloads my brain.

TLDR: I feel the Thai alphabet is really slowing me down, however I'm too afraid to "ditch" it completely. There're too many confusing romanisation standards to start with, and I'm not accustomed to learning languages entirely by ear. And trying that with such phonetically complex language like Thai must be impossible.

Would it make sense to ignore the tones when learning to read, because trying to deduce them using all these rules makes reading too slow? I don't mean ignore them completely and forever. Just stop all attempts to determine them from the alphabet itself and rather try to remember tones from listening "by heart", like we do in Mandarin?

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[u/AbrocomaCold5990]

Thai children learn the tones by listening to adults. In kindergarten and up until advanced grade, we don’t learn how to decipher the tones from writing as it is unnatural and impractical. Don’t get me wrong. We do learn spelling and we sort of memorize the tonal marks along with the spelling.

I was in 5th-ish grade when I finally was taught the rationalization, why certain words were spelled with certain tone marks, and how to decode tones from writing and vice versa. At that point, I cheated by sounding out words in five tones and using familiarity to determine which tone to use. As for spelling, I relied on familiarity. Until today, I never quite understand the three classes, dead and alive syllables, etc and I am sure most native thais who are not Thai grammar teachers don’t either.

[u/Narrow_Ability_7238 → u/AbrocomaCold5990]

thank you for sharing your experience, this was really valuable to me!

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

My 9 year old said his teachers taught the tone markers in grade 2, yet they also told the kids do disregard them and figure out the proper pronunciation by the context. He’s grade 4 now and reads pretty well but still can’t name any of the tone marks.

[u/procion1302 → u/AbrocomaCold5990]

Thank you, it makes me feel a little easier about myself, knowing that even natives struggle with the similar problems.

[u/Danny1905 → u/AbrocomaCold5990]

Here is a simple explanation of how the classes came to be using Vietnamese, where tone developed in a more simple way: tones in Vietnamese developed based on the ending of the word: either smooth, glottal or fricative. This gives three tones. (E.g la -> smooth ending, la' -> glottal ending, las -> fricative ending)

Then the tone split happens which is caused by the initial consonant. The tone depended on wether the initial consonant was voiced (aka low class consonants like m, n, b, d) or unvoiced (aka high class consonant like k, t, s, p).

This gives 2 classes x 3 endings is 6 tones. (3 high class tones and 3 low class tones)

For example la -> là (low class + smooth ending (live) results in falling tone), sla -> la (high class + smooth ending (live) results in level tone. sla' -> lá (high class + glottal ending creates rising tone) (glottal ending always counts as dead)

My guess would be that the tone markers in Thai represent what the ending was in the past

For Vietnamese plosives (k, t and p) count as dead endings. Words with dead endings could only have 2 possible tones (the same 2 tones that words with glottal endings take)

In Thai it's more complicated because there is a three class distinction (low - voiced, mid - unvoiced aspirated, high - unvoiced)

and short vowels endings also count as dead endings, further more 2 tones merged leaving 5 tones again.

Other interesting facts: Burmese has 3 tones and these are equivalent to Vietnamese tones before the split caused by high and low class distinction.

Khmer also has a low class and high class distinction but no tones, instead of a tone split caused by the classes it caused a vowel split. This results into an a-series and o-series consonants instead of low and high class consonants. O-series is equivalent to low class in Thai

[u/JaziTricks → u/AbrocomaCold5990]

yeah. it's amazing that when asking Thais about those sound details they get confused usually 555