Though Thai doesn't have conjugations for tenses, plural or gender, it is a tonal language. So take away one hard thing about learning a new language and replace it with something even MORE difficult. Not that it's a complaint. Just...another mountain.
I'm not frustrated by it. Simply nervous. Apparently, after the three months of training in Thailand, if the Peace Corps does not think you are ready, they can send you home. So, not matter what, I am preparing my butt off to learn Thai, and Thailand's customs and culture...there is NO way they are sending me home.
ma y-sa-baay for the moment, but i'm sure everything will be fineeee
1 comment:
I also found it difficult to learn Thai vocabulary. The grammar is fairly easy, once you understand that questions are asked by putting a question word at the end: "you go market when?" [khun bai talad meu-uh rai].
So I wrote Speak Easy Thai which you can download at www.thai-culture-publishing.com. It teaches vocabulary by means of images and sounds (5000 of each).
If you SEE an object and HEAR a Thai person saying the word correctly at the same time, you have a much better chance of remembering it.
Do NOT try to learn Thai from transliteration (phonetics). It's the wrong approach. Speak Easy Thai will spell a word for you, and this allows you to get used to the alphabet quickly.
Thai is nowhere near as difficult as Chinese or Japanese, because the characters are just alphabetic characters drawn differently, they are not pictograms. We have a G, they have Gah Guy, but it's still a G, just a letter, not a pictogram. And there is no upper and lower case, or different forms for writing and printing. There is just one alphabet, unlike English which has four.
You have been brainwashed since the age of 3 or 4 to accept the four English alphabets as natural. When learning English, a Thai person has to cope with 4 distinctly different English letters, all called "gee" (printed and written, big and small letters).
I tried to use tourist guidebooks, CDs, cassettes, etc., to learn Thai and made very slow progress. Speak Easy Thai includes a grammar ebook, but the key feature is the matched sounds and pix. It's not boring, I guarantee it.
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