My tips for Thai language learning
It’s been a while since I landed in Thailand and started learning Thai. I started learning from watching YouTube videos by myself, attending group online lessons for 8 hours, and now I have been taking serious 1-to-1 language lessons for almost 16 hours. Looking back my journey, here are some personal tips that I would tell myself 6 months ago.
Insist learning Thai script. It is helpful
It can easily come to our choice if we want to learn Thai script or not when we started learning Thai. It is actually possible to find a course which completely teaches Thai using English alphabets, and all you need to do is to remember the phonetics, and it is quite easy to find this learning track. Now that I have learned a bit Thai, I am glad I chose to learn how to read and write Thai script.
Learning Thai scripts helped me distinguish those subtle pronunciation. This is a typical situations for every language learners in every language when they try to repeat what the native speakers say. They thought they repeated correctly, but it could sound way off to native speakers. Then the native speaker might just repeat what they said again, and the repetition kept going until someone gave up. Learning Thai script greatly helped me combat such situation. Whenever I couldn’t accurately repeat, I just ask how it is written. Then I read it out by myself. It always worked and helped acquire the pronunciation so much more effectively than not knowing any Thai script.
Pay attention to the tone. It is very important
Thai is a tonal language. Unlike English, if you mess up some tones, even if you pronounced the word correctly, there is still a high chance people won’t understand you.
As a Chinese native speaker, I thought tone wouldn’t be hard for me at all, so I loosened my nerve and basically ignore tones and thought I could pick it up later. That is proved to be such a wrong decision.
Even I am very familiar with tones from my mother tongue, now I still think tone is the most difficult part of Thai language. It is not only because of the tone itself, it is also because of the complicated tone variation rules.
I initially decided to ignore tone, and the aftermath was that it was very difficult for people to understand me. Then when I tried to pick up the tone, I will basically have to redo a lot of elementary learning from every basic character all over again.
If you are starting from the scratch, I would really recommend you to:
- Do remember the example word for each consonant (every Thai consonant comes with an example word; for example, ก by itself is g or k, but the example word for ก is โกไก่). Try to find some app to pronounce the example word for you, and try to mimic it as accurate as possible. Reading those example word is a great way to get used to tone;
- Not too long after you start learning Thai, you will find out Thai consonants are divided into three categories. Do NOT ignore them if you want to conquer the tone. Remembering which consonant belongs to which group is the foundation to figure out tone variation rules;
- Try to use and evaluate the tone variation rules a lot, but don’t just recite them. Try getting some example words by yourself and refer back to them. For example, I used สี (colour) and สีลม (Silom) to help me remember the rule for high class constant + long vowel and low class consonant + live ending.
Be prepared for second languages competing in your mind. Don’t be upset
English is my second language. Even though I spoke English every day at work and in my daily life in Thailand, I still noticed significant deterioration of my English proficiency.
When I just landed Thailand, I only spoke Chinese and English. I could speak English almost without thinking. Now with my active learning process in Thai language, I sometimes need to concentrate more to phrase what I want to say in English. And at the very beginning, it was even worse that I sometimes just wanted to give up speaking English when I didn’t have to because I simply didn’t want.
I reckon that is just a phase. I had similar experience when I started using English in my real life intensively for the first time in my life. In the past, I thought it was because I wasn’t used to speaking a different language, and I definitely wasn’t expecting to go through this again. It turns out that it is just a natural process for all languages, at least it is for me.
Now I am basically going through my journey to learn English again. As I tried to expose myself in Thai context and tried to phrase Thai sentences a lot lately, I started dreaming in Thai language too, though I don’t remember anything and can be sure most of those dreams won’t really make sense. Now I am feeling when I want to say something in English, the first word coming up in my mind is Thai. I suppose this is because my subconsciousness still classifies Thai and English in the same category, which is second language. This is my first time dealing with this situation, and I have not yet find a great way. But just a heads-up to anyone whose first language is not English. You might go through the same thing with me, and don’t be upset with it. It is just a normal process in our learning journey.
If anyone wants a recommendation for Thai language school, I would highly recommend my language school in Bangkok Baan Aksorn (บ้านอักษร) . It is a lovely Thai traditional cottage. I really enjoy my time there.