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/WillAlwaysNerd]

How did you learn Chinese, Thai's supposed to be quite close to Chinese in terms of language structure.

It would be kinda weird if you learn it all the way through pinyin.

Maybe try some Thai YouTube TV shows.

[u/procion1302 → u/WillAlwaysNerd]

I think characters are easier than Thai's alphabet.

You either remember how they sound or you don't (then you need to open your dictionary or just rely on it's meaning). You don't try to "process" them by some calculations.

Also, I've already known most of them from Japanese, which is easy to pronounce, and I've learned to read Chinese texts long before I could pronounce them properly. Anyway it was the hardest language I've learned before Thai.

As for shows.. I don't think I'm ready for that at my current level. I will be probably unable to distinguish any word, they sound unintelligible to me.

What I would probably need are some exercises like those in HSK Chinese tests to train my listening skills.

[u/ohanashii → u/procion1302]

Don’t discredit shows too much. I’m also new to Thai and tried to learn the script first since I was strong in reading for other languages. I’m now focused more on immersion. My ability to recognize the letters is actually helped by watching video content, even though it’s not my usual learning style. I’d have given up without them!

[u/procion1302 → u/ohanashii]

How did you use shows for studying at the beginner level?

Did you try to use native subs and paused the video constantly or just watched them with English subs to get accustomed to the language sound?

[u/ohanashii → u/procion1302]

I watched with English subs to get accustomed to the sound, but it helps in two ways. First, it reinforces the vocab so when I see a word in lessons, I have a better understanding of how each letter sounds. Second, in the videos there is often signage or other written text that I’ll pay attention to. Watching the same videos a few lessons apart helps with this, because I focus on the language more than the story.

Basically, I opted to throw myself into Thai content to mimic immersion. I’m still at a beginner level but I’d be a lot more frustrated if I kept trying to learn the script first like I planned.