by Daniel
I searched for books about learning Thai, and I found these three:
Which one is the best for learning to speak Thai?
Let's dig in and find out more about each one. First off, however, let me give my general take on learning Thai using any of these books:
Each of these books tries to represent Thai sounds using the roman alphabet, but it's doubtful that you'd get the sounds right without hearing them.
On the other hand, as someone who has had quite a bit of exposure to hearing Thai, I find the books quite helpful. So that's probably the trick: Listen first, then expand your repertoire with the books.
These books are filled with hundreds of useful things to say, but it's unlikely that you'd be able to recall anything readily enough to use it on the spot. For vocabulary and sentence structures to come naturally, you need to encounter them multiple times. You can't develop any kind of fluency from reading a book.
I think the best option for a motivated learner trying to learn from these books would be to build flashcard decks for either Thai for Beginners or Speak Thai Today. Especially if you generated audio to go along with it, you'd have yourself a pretty good resource that would actually develop your Thai speaking.
Anyway, here's a bit more about each of the three books on learning Thai:
Nantana Ozawa's Learn Thai was the first book I came across, after my wife saw it at a stand at a bus station and bought it for me. It's sort of picture dictionary enhanced with some sentence patterns.
For example, a page of clothes also gives you the patterns "I want to have ___," "Do you have ___?" and "Where do they sell ___?"
This book has lots of color and images, including several pages with pictures of Thai dishes. (Although many of the thumbnail-sized pictures still left me unsure about what I was looking at...)
Towards the end of the book, it switches to cover some basics of Thai writing and Thai grammar.
The transliteration of Learn Thai doesn't mark tone, which I think makes it the least helpful of the systems in these books.
Conclusion: Learn Thai: Quick Guide for Beginners is a step ahead of your usual phrasebook or picture dictionary. Don't expect to get beyond the most basic of interactions.
This is the first in Benjawan Poomsan Becker's trilogy of Thai learning books (Thai for Beginners, Thai for Intermediate Learners, and Thai for Advanced Readers).
Thai for Beginners covers both speaking and writing. The second half of each lesson focuses on writing Thai. So, if you're wanting to learn both skills at the same time, this is a good resource for that.
The format of each chapter is:
Other than for writing, instruction is pretty sparse; it's mostly just footnotes for the example sentences.
While the content is solid, I think the lessons are a bit too heavy. She could have easily turned these 10 chapters into 30 that were each a bit more focused, and each one doable in a single sitting.
Although there aren't really "lessons" per se, I could see this as a very nice source for an Anki deck that covered basic vocabulary and sentences.
There's audio floating around for this book, as well, but it didn't come with my copy.
Becker's transliteration system is perhaps the most popular system for Thai learners, as it faithfully represents all of the sounds and tones of Thai. As a linguistics dork, I dislike some of her grapheme choices, but there's really not too much to complain about.
Conclusion: The content is great, but the lengthy lessons may deter learners who aren't highly determined to push through.
Speak Thai Today comes out of the materials from a language school in Phuket, and it feels like something that has been learner-tested. That's probably also a product of the authorial team, a combination of a Thai-learner and Thai-teacher.
Personally, I found Speak Thai Today to be the most helpful of the books.
The format for each chapter is:
I like the sequencing of Speak Thai Today a lot. For a couple reasons:
Many resources start with common greetings and small-talk questions, which are useful to say but often with a lot of complexity to explain. Fereday and Pimsuwan start with some of the basic constructions that you will find yourself using all of the time: "I want to...", "Do you ___?", "Can you ___?". (They still cover "Greetings and Small Talk" in Chapter 5.)
Each lesson is also small enough to wrap your head around, which corrects the biggest issue I had with Thai for Beginners above.
The authors have a separate book about reading Thai (titled, unsurprisingly, Read and Write Thai Today), so this one focuses only on speaking.
They also have audio resources on their website for all of the examples in the book, which use Microsoft's computer generated Thai voices.
The transliteration system is okay: It marks vowel length and tone. One quibble is its inconsistency with syllable-final consonants. Sometimes the authors write them as spelled in Thai (i.e. "b", "d") and sometimes as they are pronounced ("p", "t").
Conclusion: Speak Thai Today is a great resource. It's teaches practical expressions with a steady, logical progression. If you found a way to get repeated exposure to this material, you could actually be speaking Thai.
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