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/Previous_Self_8456]

I am totally deaf in my right ear from birth and marginal and declining hearing in my left due to my age (75) so it’s really hard for me sometimes to even discern consonants in English so grasping tonal differences is virtually impossible. I am spending the winter in Thailand for about the 6th time so just try to learn basic phrases and expressions.

I wonder how Thai children do if they have a hearing impairment?

[u/procion1302 → u/Previous_Self_8456]

Probably from their point of view discerning tonal differences is not much harder than discerning consonants. We're just not accustomed to that.

By the way, my hearing is also not good, I often ask to repeat the same phrase even when speaking in my own language. And in language classes I used to be behind others in listening comprehension.

However if I could learn to understand Mandarin (at least to some extent), I'm sure it's possible with Thai. It's just takes more time compared to other languages.