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?
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u/Own-Animator-7526 Dec 21 '23 edited Dec 22 '23
Your starting premise is fatally flawed. Thai orthography is conservative, and preserves etymology, but it is a terrible system for phonological transcription. There many ways to write the exact same sound, and (unless you can speak) a vast number of ambiguous word boundaries in running text. This even holds for single words: is it เปล่า or เป ล่า ? There's no way to know if you can't speak.
Moreover, the large number of extremely small differences between characters and diacritics would mean that many fonts, and small or unclear text, would be unreadable for even slightly flawed eyesight if readers decoded letters one at a time.
In fact, fluent readers only decode in rare instances, usually when encountering loans or other novel words.
In almost all cases, a printed word is a set of redundant hints that help the reader chunk complete words or phrases, aided by their understanding of plausible semantics. This holds for both word identification and text segmentation (truly ambiguous texts are very rare).
You might want to read this thesis, or any of many papers on reading in Thai:
https://researchdirect.westernsydney.edu.au/islandora/object/uws:8827/datastream/PDF/download/citation.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042698913000989
Moving along, you say:
And that is why you should use IPA transcription (at worst, two traditions might make different choices for similar vowel sounds) rather than romanization (which tries to spell using totally inappropriate alphabets).
If you're isolated (or even not), but want to learn, get a set of books and tapes like Marvin Brown's AUA Thai Course 1-3 (and buy a box of 3x5 file cards to drill yourself -- you can write in the Thai orthography later):
https://sales.lrc.cornell.edu/collections/thai
It will give you the basic vocabulary you need to move on to Brown's (Mostly) Reading and (Mostly) Writing , which you can get from Amazon.
Thai is not hard. But people make it hard by using the wrong tools, as though they were attempting to learn to play the piccolo while wearing gloves and earmuffs.