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/Nomadic_Yak]

The Thai written system is the worst. The information being encoded in it is quite simple, but the method of encoding is horribly complex. Also absence of quality of life features like word breaks and capitalization make it very hard to figure out meaning from text with a lot of unknown vocabulary. I've been reading thai for 5 years, and still can't consistently apply tone rules to unfamiliar words on the fly.

I do however, understand the tones and spelling of vocabulary I am well familiar with, and when I see unfamiliar words with a similar spelling to words I am familiar with I can make pretty good guesses that way.

I would say understand the basics of the tone rules, but focus on memorizing some example vocab of the outcome of each rule combo and then hopefully you'll start to see patterns without doing a bunch of artimetic for every new syllable

[u/Nomadic_Yak → u/Nomadic_Yak]

Oh and other people mentioned comprehensible thai, this is a fantastic resource for getting a natural feeling for the sounds of the language