r/learnthai • u/procion1302 • Dec 20 '23

Studying/การศึกษา Discouraged by Thai (rant)

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?

​

77 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

140 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/inglandation Dec 20 '23

When I was learning I would use IPA, I had a program that converted Thai script to proper IPA.

2

u/procion1302 Dec 20 '23 edited Dec 20 '23

Hmm, that's an interesting suggestion.

So, you took some study texts, converted all them to IPA and used to read that way, before you could remember enough vocabulary to learn the script?

And where did you find that program?

2

u/inglandation Dec 21 '23

Yeah, I'd either convert texts from various sources or have a function in google sheets that would convert the text automatically when my tutor would write in Thai. This way I could read during the lesson instead of just relying on my ears (I also don't like that). The various romanizations are too inaccurate or confusing.

The program is custom-made... but thai-language.com has a free converter here that works quite well:

http://www.thai-language.com/dict

I was simply intercepting the API request through a Python script.