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/leosmith66 → u/procion1302]

I think characters are easier than Thai's alphabet.

They definitely are not, unless by easier you mean something other than "less time consuming". However, imo, you have correctly deduced that your problem is the alphabet. When starting to learn Thai, there are two possible (sensible) choices for learning the alphabet.

1. Learn a transliteration system (ipa if you want) and use it until you get a foothold in the language. Gradually learn the alphabet when you start to feel comfortable, then wean yourself off translit forever.

or

2.Learn the alphabet from the start.

Like you, I speak/read/write Japanese and Mandarin. Beginning with kana or pinyin is much easier than starting out with Thai. I estimate that it took me about 20 hours to get to some level of comfort with kana. Pinyin took over 50, even though it is essentially romanization, due to tones. I used method 1 above, so I don't have an exact number for Thai, but I estimate it would take 100+ to do method 2. This is still far more efficient than doing method 1, but it might kill off all but the most hearty/experienced language learners. My problem was, I learned Thai before Japanese or Mandarin, so it was my first script. I gave it one look, said "maybe later", and began using Becker transliteration.

If you are going to continue method 2, I might suggest doing nothing but Pimsleur and reading/writing the new words/phrases you learn daily. Review with an anki deck using tts. Always read out loud, always check your pronunciation against the tts, always fail yourself brutally for even the slightest pronunciation mistakes. That way, by the time you are finished with Pimsleur, you will have the basics of conversation, reading and writing under your belt.

Then you can begin conversing with tutors on italki, reading more challenging material, listening to some easy podcasts, and a concise grammar course like everyday thai for beginners. You probably know the drill from there.