I agree. Must learn Thai script. I studied Thai on my own for a year using the English alphabet to write down Thai words. No one knew what I was saying it was infuriating. I swallowed my pride, tried a few sample lessons from LTFAWG, and spent an hour at Starbucks a day, and three weeks later I was reading Thai. When I say reading, I could sound 90% of what I was reading but at a 1st grader's pace. It's been a couple of years since then I can read Thai at the rate of an adult and with good accuracy and understand far more of what I am reading. I wish I had taken the time to learn before and not waste a year doing it my own way. I still have a long way to go with speaking and understanding.
You are doing really well then because my Thai wife, whom has two bachelors degrees, has trouble reading somethings... LOL She says the way some vowels are used is infuriating to her. Me I agree that for pronunciation one needs to know the root sound of any language example being งู in anglicized Thai this would be just impossible to figure out. Happy learning I am 2.5 years into finding out how NOT to do it :)
This is probably why my Thai tones are so much worse than my Chinese tones. Even in Vietnamese where my tones are bad I at least know what tone I should try to use for every word. In Thai I'm lost in the dark. Even worse for Lao because they don't pronounce the tones as distinctly as Thais do.
I had learnt at one moment Khmer language and the alphabet is similar. I took about 4 months to acquire it, so it eventhough tough, Thai, Lao and Khmer for the scripture. For the tones, I do agree, it does need time to be easy on it (I would say between two to three years; the same in Mandarin , Vietnamese and Cantonese).
Yeah the tones were really easy to pronounce since I spoke Thai but I kinda say they wrong cause I was also learning English and It’s kinda hard to understand Thai words cuz of English but I’m still Thai and Live in Thailand with my family.
When someone ask me this question: "How did you learn to read Thai?" I actually don't know what to answer. I just remember that i always listen to Thai songs (mostly from Y series) and see some lyrics in the videos. And in my free time, i watch Thai lessons from ThaiPod101 and mostly videos of Kru Mod & Kru Pear from ThaiwithMod. But my most fave is Thai Alphabet Song 😂 Slowly, i can read some. Then one day, i woke up, listening to Thai song (คนนั้นต้องเป็นเธอ - วิน เมธวิน) my heart almost drop when i read lyrics 😭 I can really sing Thai by reading the lyrics 😭 That was my biggest achievement in my learning Thai journey. Until now, i can sing Thai without the lyrics cuz i can memorize it! Right now, my most fave Thai songs are กีดกัน,ฝนตกไหม,คิด(เเตไม่)ถึง & ตกลงฉันคิดไปใช่ไหม 🥰❤ Anyway, Phi Paddy is one of my guide when i'm starting to learn Thai. Videos of Phi motivates me more. ขอบคุณค่ะพี่ 🥰🧡
The moment I learned that each letter of the Thai alphabet was also a functional noun, a useful vocabulary word, i.e. "chicken," "egg," "bottle," "bag," "turtle" etc. I set my mind to learn the whole thing. After having studied Thai for 3 months trying to use Roman letters, learning the Thai alphabet was a game changer. Here I diverge from all of your other excellent advice. Different people have different learning styles. The way I did it was to write all 44 letters in an 8X5 grid with 4 at the bottom, pronouncing the letter with the tones, over and over. Some days 5 times. The first time took 45 minutes, now I can do one in 4 minutes flat. I have a really high tolerance for tedium, and the gun being held to my head was cocked lol. Either way, learn the letters, with the tones. Two basic things at once. The obsolete letters are good to be familiar with, but as Paddy says, they are hardly ever seen. "Kuad" - "bottle" and "kohn" - "person" are the two of them that are crucial. Great videos, new subscriber here.
The book Read Thai in 10 Days is very helpful, it breaks down the consonants in groups as you suggest and these groupings are then used for learning tone rules.
I was looking for this comment and glad I found it. Especially understanding the low-mid-high class of consonants is ESSENTIAL for understanding tones and this book does that phenomenally.
I agree for 100%, Paddy. The next level is to read and listen to short stories in order to remember the words consistently. But it's hard to find easy to read and listen stories here.
I learned how to read Thai when I was 7. I remember constantly looking at the poster with the Thai alphabet in my kitchen. I knew the Thai alphabet song so I kept looking at it and realized that if I put this sound and this sound together it made a word 😂 After that I continued Thai school at a local Thai temple and it just stuck. It's nice that you are there to encourage others. I really admire you 😍
The Thai writing system actually makes a lot of sense, even more than some others. It's pretty simple when you stop and take a better look. It definitely can seem overwhelming at first glance.
Several years ago I began learning the Thai alphabet, but never got very far. Because of the tone rules I wasn’t sure when I’d ever learn to read and began studying using romanizations. Luckily I had audios to study with and also knew how many of the romanizations sounded because I watched TV in Thai. When I reproached the alphabet with the right resources I was able to learn to read in less than two weeks. My prior knowledge was probably helpful in my fast learning of the alphabet and tone rules, however now that I’m able to read Thai I don’t see it as such a difficult writing system anymore...well, except for when there are exceptions to the rules such as with foreign words.
This reminds me of a friend when I was a teenager who asked me about a Spanish sign he saw in store windows, but he said it with English pronunciations which made it impossible to know what he was looking at. I can't remember what it was, but I do remember when I finally figured it out it was hilarious. He couldn't understand you can't use English pronunciation to read other languages as he was monolingual. Everyone should learn at least one other language fluently
I am sure everyone has varied experiences. I leaned to read thai in about a month#1.thai letters actually do align mostly with the English alphabet repeating rhem in that sequence you will learn consonants a simple child thai writing book will do the trick you simply need to sequence the pages. #2 thai vowels align as well example 8 variances for English vowel A by grouping them together in pairs and practicing long and short (,,easy) #3 basic thai words for 2 or three characters initial consonant and vowel (,minimum) or initial consonant vowel and final consonant which are place into 8 group each groipnproducing a particular soun. (consonant clusters may ass a 4th characater) larger words then are made up of multiple syllables (smaller words) #4 one must understand missing vowels(7 rules) ; change vowels (when vowel follows a consonant) #5 finally you ttneed to recognize written characters that are not always pronounced ( 3 of them ) along with silent consonants. The challenge was a pulling together this information as I could find one single detailed source tooth
I'm learning Thai now, and I think that learning how to read thai make everithing more easy! Plus is kinda fun understanding another culture throught the writing 😍
I absolutely love thai language! I've been learning thai for around 10 months and thai alphabet is the easiest thing about Thai in my opinion hahahas specially compared with tone rules and sentence structure
My tip for learning the thai alphabet, which is the one I use (and that's why now know how to read/write in less than three months) is just practice the writing! If your mother tongue uses the latin alphabet, just get a bunch of random words, and try writing them using the thai alphabet. Try to make it sound as close as possible to the word! I did this a lot, and it was fun + helped me a lot. Since there are letters that seem to sound the same, when you do this exercise with words you already know the sound of, the difference is clear!
Hey Paddy, love your style. Have been stranded in northern Thailand more than a year but have been really slack on teaching myself to talk the lingo. I have made white board displays of the alphabet, tone marks etc. and have saved heaps of RU-vid vids on how to speak Thai. When shopping I use Google translate which isn't always right but a snapshot of what l want usually works. I find your way of teaching very appealing and reassuring. I can read the sounds but dont yet have the vocab. There is a small restaurant in Klang Wiang Rd. a few hundred metres north of the Kok River bridge, Chiang Rai that has an image of you on a sign outside the shop. Seems you are a bit of an institution in certain circles. Will keep progressing slowly. My Thai GF isn't much help. She speaks pidgin English but does not want me to speak Thai because then I will know what she says about me to her friends. She is a good cook. Cheers Mate.
Hey Tasman! Good luck with the lingo - keep at it! That’s amazing about the sign on the shop! If you ever have time to take a photo of it and send it to me on Instagram, that would be really appreciated! Thanks for watching and supporting 🙏
@@ThaiTalkwithPaddy Sure thing Paddy, will go take photo tomorrow. I know it sounds ridiculous but I'm not really instagram savvy. I'm about as old as your grandfather. (Black and white TV only started when I was at school) But I can find a way. I can ask some good looking young person. Cheers
hey tasman, i seem to be in the exact same situation as you haha. im even in chiang rai too! just started learning the alphabet today so i hope both of us succeed
Thanks for the tips mate, iv'e been studying to speak Thai for almost one year, i would love to be able to read and write Thai so i can text my Thai friends also and not use the translator app, once i printed off the alphabet i was in a completely new world, i couldn't get my head around it. I like the idea of flash cards, i will give it a go. thanks mate take care
I even know to myself that learning Thai is hard but I'm here studying and trying to learn it instead of learning my foreign language which is french haha!
Comparing those three languages sort of puts it in perspective. I learned all the hiragana for Japanese, but gave up on reading and writing Thai. Perhaps I should give it another go
These are great tips. I am learning Thai. I am still learning but I will add a couple of tips based on what has helped me: 1) I see so many people who say they learn the abugida in a couple of months. Maybe? First, the standard font is not the only font, so learning Thai script means you need to learn other fonts. So, your learning is not done yet with just the standard font! Also, some letters are pronounced the same, as far I can tell what makes them different is the tone and how they are used (e.g. ผ vs พ). So, you need to know tones. Some letters make similar sounds, so to really learn them you have to listen to a lot of Thai. Also, the sound a letter makes changes if they are at the end vs the beginning of a syllable. A lot of them make the same exact sound and so you can't tell which is which unless you know the spelling of the word. For all these rules, I recommend bananathai. She has a website and a youtube channel. 2) Practice reading (and writing). I read twitter or FB posts in Thai, especially short ones. The more Thai you read, the better you get at reading it. 3) Because in Thai there are no spaces between words, learning words is critical so you can start seeing the separation between them. Eventually, with practice, you will learn how to sequentially read a sentence and find the different words. I am not there yet :) 4) Vowels are the most difficult. Diphthongs are very hard. I like Stuart Jay Raj videos on vowels. I highly recommend listening to his videos! He is a real pro! 5) Practice reading other fonts, not just the standard font. I like to read the titles of series or the name of the actors in a series when the credits roll or in the opening sequence (I already know the names). This helps me learn the different fonts. 6) A lot of us watch Thai entertainment. Learn the names of your favorite TV actors in Thai. This is good for learning pronunciation too, as you probably hear their names a lot in interviews etc. 7) Get a thai keyboard for your cellphone and use it to google things in thai or to google translate words you see on a youtube video, a TV series or a sign in the background of a video. The more you transcribe words, the better you get at reading Thai and learning new words ;) 8) Speaking of Thai keyboards, Bing translator has a thai keyboard that can be used when you are translating from Thai to English. It works very well on a computer. I use it all the time to transcribe words I see on the screen and find their meaning
It's also worth noting that Thai news, letters, texts, facebook posts, etc will be in Thai Script (OBVIOUSLY). If you want to communicate with Thais outside of speaking, you are shooting yourself in the foot by not learning to read Thai Script. If you want to ask them to write something down for you (which I ask for help a million times a day to my wife), they will be writing in Thai. Great video and important topic. I love your enthusiasm for Thai and the content!
Thanks Paddy! I recently started with the alphabet, 16 years after my 1st trip to Thailand. Hope to go back Oct or Nov. this year. Great work as always Paddy!
I actually rlly recommend learning the thai alphabet!! Im half thai and always wanted to speak it fluently to my mom! By learning the thai alphabet for some weeks, made me able to say "ng" and "mue" sounds!!
I’ve been trying to learn to read half heartedly for about a year, but I’ve promised myself that I will read street signs before I get to Thailand next. I will be able to read the menu items for my favourite street food, or bust!
I've started learning to read Thai in small chunks as you say. I began by using Stu Jay Raj's video about the right order to learn the thai consonants in. His Indic Consonant Compass seems like a great tool aswell. Thanks for the video, I enjoy your humour
@@ThaiTalkwithPaddy Could I ask a question please? Why when writing the date in Thai are the 2 signal letters before the yr 9 มกราคม ค.ศ. 2024 My son asked me this and it stumped myself and my wife. We honestly had no idea how to explain it to him.
I have been struggling with trying to learn how to read Thai and this video was very helpful and encouraging. Your other videos have also been very helpful, and come highly recommended by my Thai teacher. On a totally unrelated note, I have been hearing about all the flooding in your part of the world, so I hope you are doing OK.
Glad the videos can help Todd! Yeh the flooding has been absolutely devastating. Rain has only stopped today but it will be a long recovery for many. Thanks for the well wishes
I Just Started Learning and studying the Thai Language and it is so fascinating. Your Videos are Great and I listen to them often for repetition. Thanks for The Videos. สวัสดี
ผมสนับสนุนแต่ผมมีความคิดอืนครับ So I am a missionary for my church and was suposed to go to Thailand last April. I'm still in america but regardless I was told to learn Thai and something that had helped me learn the Alphabet that I would like to add on is 1. Apply images to the charachters e.g. ก Gaw gai (the charachter for the G/K ish sound) means chicken and it kinda looks like a chicken. Or ง ngaw nguu (the charachter for the ng sound) means snake and it kinda looks like a snake. You can do this with most of the charachters. Another thing is read alot. Read outloud it really helps trust me. Pick up the nearest Thai book you can find and start reading outloud even if you are supper slow and have to look at a script card every 2 seconds. And even if you dont know what words your actually saying. It helps alot and as you get beter try and understand the words.
Now that was fun and really interesting 🤣🤣🤣 I am used to transcribed Thai on menus (of course 😋😋😋 like kaeng/gaeng bpaa/paa moo/muh/muu) and got used to the many different ways used there. But when seeing Thai characters running in one long, uninterrupted sequence, I am still wondering how I could break them up into meaningful words. Please do another one on reading/writing Thai 🥰🥰🥰 Particularly on how “precise” the letters have to be written (as in Chinese and Japanese).
It's actually easier to break them up than you think. I often use foods, ingredients, and menus to start because you see the same words over and over again and for the foods you really love you learn to identify the written words for them. kaeng/gaeng = แกง moo/muh/muu = หมู. ก is the k/g and is the most common or at least the easiest letter. ง is the "ng" sound and the thing underneath มู is the long u/oo sound.
Hello first time here 🙂 watching your videos 🙂 let's spread love and peace 🕊️ all over the world.. watching from Manila Philippines asian country now 🇵🇭🌹 god bless you
Thanks Paddy! I've been learning Thai on my own for a while and I love your tips and motivation. I learned the Thai alphabet and my approach is not to think of it as 'difficult' but rather as a fun challenge, like a puzzle. I also am using your advice to learn sentences and not lists of vocabulary.
I began memorizing the low class consonants first. Then the middle class consonants. Then the high class consonants. Before beginning vowels I first acclimated myself with the IPA chart, to prepare my throat/palate for sounds that English does not have. Then for vowels I started with non-diphthongs. Then tackled the diphthong vowels. IPA Chart: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio
I started school to learn Thai last July and felt lost until we started the reading and writing process, now it’s getting easier every day. But I’m not planning on learning it in a Month, I’m retired and have to much fun enjoying Thailand for that.
Thanks Paddy, Good tips coming from someone who is in a position to help others to learn Thai. One thing I have never heard explained is how Thai words seem to continually run together with no breaks where one sentence ends and the next begins. 5555!
As a language learner myself, I agree with you about learning Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. You can speak the languages by knowing Pinyin and Romaji if what you're after is just to communicate at first. While learning Thai now, I really need to read and write to be able to speak, it's amazing though!
Also to add most thai people struggle to understand foreign speakers because we tend not to learn thai vowels first (big mistakes ) and not knowing how important tones are. The tone can change the entire meaning. Most important is using the correct thai syntax. Subject+verb ÷objective. Adjectives follow nouns. Try not to reply in one word responses(Doing this, I have found most thais will not understand you )
Love those flash cards! Picked up a pack. Have been doing some video lessons for the alphabet and been practicing writing but they look like just what I need to solidify the learning and practise. Thanks!
I am an Indonesian who can read Thai aksorn after watching Thai series and listening Thai song a whole month. After 9 months I still struggling in tone rules lol ยากมากกก
My tip would be to learn each consonant class one at a time. Knowing the High, Medium and Low class characters by heart will allow you to read the pronunciation tone really easily!
Maybe for some people. I used this method and even when I knew all the classes by heart I still could never calculate the tones. I've since forgotten the classes of most letters.
@@andrewdunbar828 Fair enough, thanks for the insight. I definitely success with this method because I would go through reading exercises targeted on the consonant class I just reviewed to make sure I had them down. All about strategy (which I why my grammar is so bad right now)
@@DrewWillson Yes I also never found the right kind of material to read. Children's books don't work for me and Thais are not big readers so bookshops aren't that common and don't have much range, otherwise I buy certain books in every language I try to learn. In Thailand I mostly get stuck around reading signs and menus and interacting with shop staff. And that's when I'm in Thailand. Where I am now I never see Thais )-:
I have already passed the hurdle of learning all the consonants and vowels! The next bosses to defeat are the ff: 1. How to identify when a word starts and end on a sentence (because Thai don't use spaces between words huhuhuhu) 2. How to pronounce syllables with missing vowels (is it o or a, am confused!!!!!) 3. How to easily remember tones from new vocabulary words!
Interesting questions. For the 2nd, just pulled out of my memory in quick. Most syllable with missing vowel should sound with "o" either long or short for word which routed from true tai-kadai language family. The word/syllable to sound "a" might be the words that adopted from Pali-sanskit in the past. someone might correct me about this. By the way since Thai people just memorized everything so we need not to pause then think of the rule.
The alphabet wasn't so bad - or at least the consonants - but the trouble is that vowels float everywhere around the words, and there are no gaps between the words. You have to already have an idea what the word is before being able to sound it out helps. (I've been ramming a hundred key verbs into my head. I wrote the ones I tend to stick on in Thai. That's interesting. You can't remember the word for (say) respect, or sightsee, so your hint is in Thai! You sound it out, and some point go, "Damn it: kowrop!")
Great tips. Agree. Depends how one wants to use the language. Not there yet. Just beginning w/script. Though I realize it's all interconnected, phonetically learning mostly vocab/ listening a lot at the moment. Feels like solving a giant puzzle. Learning/remembering Thai for me is a hobby at this point. I'm not in a rush. Living in Thailand the motivation to learn would go up for myself. Main thing is to enjoy the language-have fun w/it.
Just starting out the alphabet as I am struggling with remembering spoken phrases & words in Thai. My thinking is that if I can read Thai my vocabulary should increase without being in Thailand. Great advice will try only a few letters at a time see if that helps
I learned that Thai alphabet in about a week. But I didnt stick at it to learn classes and tones and everything else, and didnt start practicing reading. I will get back to it, but just learning the alphabet alone has already been helpful, I can at least read a little bit.
i got the consonants down but have to finish with the vowels. And it's not just consonants but also understanding mid/high/low live/low pair groups since their tones are affected by that.
Love ur enthusiasm....love ur sense of humour...my 2 thai kids think ur brilliant, n I should follow your tips , coming from 2 grade A student's, high praise indeed...
Ha! Your Chinese pronunciation is way better than a naive English speaker trying to pronounce pinyin phonetically! You can do Japanese this way but not Chinese. It took me about a year of hanging out in Taiwan and China to get past that because even native speakers think pinyin is phonetic and don't get why we can't pronounce it. Unless they're teachers or linguists. Then again in Taiwan hardly anyone knows pinyin because they use zhuyin instead. My Thai pronunciation sucks in comparison to my Mandarin pronunciation now, but I find that Thais are more likely to understand my crap pronunciation than Chinese were back when my Chinese pronunciation was crap. But yeah great video. I'd really love to see you and Stu Jay Raj do a video together by the way.
Hey Paddy, interesting video thank you for making it. However, I do not really see how you can be able to read Thai in or under a month. I set my mind on learning to read fluently before starting with a structured way of learning to speak and I am stunned by all the comments suggesting it's an easy thing or even possible within weeks when in my experience it isn't. Thai is not English but in many ways the writing for both languages is similar, both of them are just to a certain extent phonetical with heaps of exceptions and irregularities. Learning the alphabet in Thai doesn't mean a thing and can be done within days but then once you start reading you realize the real complications. The importance of low, mid and high class consonants; their combination; the tone markers and how the same tone marker means something different for different classed consonants; unmarked short and long vowels; consonants changing sound at the end of words, etc. etc. Not even mentioning that Thai is an Abugida writing system where words often carry a second meaning apart from what you actually read into it; or that vowels in a big number of words are simply omitted and you have to learn what to 'insert'; or that Thai doesn't use punctuation and you have to learn where to separate syllables in order to know where a word starts and finishes. And there is a truckload of other peculiarities. I have been learning reading for about four months twice a week with a teacher, and self-study between 1-2 hours every day using the books (monolingual) Thai students use. Still, every lesson I am introduced a new rule. I speak some Mandarian Chinese so the tones are not new to me, still the Thai tones are (slightly) different but I can imagine how difficult they seem when first seen. I expect myself to be fluently reading (like students at the end of grade 2) with the correct tones in about a month, after around 200 hours of studying. Thai is not my second or third foreign language and learning other languages before (even when very different) has helped me a lot in my approach so there are some points I agree with (from the video). To everyone who is thinking about learning Thai and has at least a year in Thailand I suggest start with the reading and then shift towards speaking and vocabulary. If you have less, like say 6-9 months you might want to learn the basics of the alphabet and go with Romanization. But, as a conclusion: it is possible and just learn Thai, in any form.
Paddy, I still write with Expo markers on my bathroom mirror for any new French words. My newest French word was how to say the Spanish word “tamale”, 👉🏻 le tamal.
I am currently studying and learning thai while being a student of our univ. that's why it was so hard for me. But thanks for this vid. Khop khun mak P!
Hi Paddy ! Thank you so much for your videos ! I learned to read and write Thai in 3 months, and because of you essentially, and your tips ^^ I'm sorry for my English, I'm French :P
Thailand Ministry of Education needs to hire Paddy to construct the courses "Learning Thai for English Speaker" สวัสดีครับ ไม่ได้เข้ามาดูนานเลย As of now coming to Thailand is harder than before, who will still interested to learn Thai ?
Hi Paddy Great tips when I started to learn to read and write Thai everyone said how can you learn it with their alphabet being so different to English. The way I tell people is both languages have characters or letters which are just shapes that represent a sound. If you apply your mind to that you will learn quickly. Regards Iain
Anyway to get a list of the 30 or so consonants used in everyday communication? Also I liked the reference for puuan and how you told us how to move our mouth accordingly for people to understand. Any resources or ways to learn the pronunciation like that?
Ha, I just asked if it is useful to learn to read/write on your 5 tips to speaking Thai in six months broadcast and the very next RU-vid suggestion I got was for this broadcast. Seems RU-vid really DOES know me better than I know myself (oh my Buddha - not sure if that's a good thing, or not).