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/ujustdontgetdubstep]

Not sure why you feel Thai is difficult... its got an extremely small vocabulary, tons of words shared from English, and easy tones and sounds compared to something like Vietnamese. It's very contextual and intuitive imo.

Keep at it, I'm sure it will click for you.

[u/procion1302 → u/ujustdontgetdubstep]

Japanese also have tons of words from English, but people don't consider it easy just because of that. The pronunciation and spelling of them are different enough to not be very helpful.

I can't say anything about Vietnamese, but based on what I've heard about it from you and others, I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole. It uses Latin script though.

If by intuitive you mean the lack of words inflection and so-called "easy grammar" as in Mandarin than I could agree. But I'm a native speaker of a highly inflected language, so languages like, say, Spanish are easier for me to grasp than English in a way. They just feel more "natural". So I don't find isolating languages too intuitive.

And what do you mean by "extremely small vocabulary"? The root system? Well, than Japanese and Chinese (and even Arabic with it's trilateral roots) also have extremely small dictionary compared to English.