#thai learning

[namtans-jean-jacket]

learning thai is so fucking funny because I'll be staring at a word, trying to sound it out and still not getting it and the word is

ไอศกรีม

it's fucking ice cream. it's literally just ice cream spelled with thai characters. it's ice cream. (ไอ=ai, ศ=s, ก=k, รี=ree, ม=m ai-suh-kreem it's fucking ice cream bro)

[squeakygeeky]

6 months of Thai

At this point I'm a little over 300 hours of comprehensible input, meaning listening practice geared towards certain levels. I've been mostly using Comprehensible Thai and related channels (join our discord). Currently I'm on the Beginner 3 playlist. This has been an average of almost 2 hrs a day, although I've slowed down lately. I don't count subtitled media towards this number, but I think I do pick things up from that. Lately I've been taking about 2 hrs a week of 'listening webinars' from Khroo Ying which are not traditional lessons because it's mostly the teacher talking about a topic for listening practice, although she'll ask the students questions to keep them engaged. I like them a lot and they're fairly inexpensive.

I feel like I know a lot of basic vocabulary now when I hear it, but I'm still not trying to speak and only basic phrases will pop into my mind. I'm still missing a lot of function words. I've picked up on more function words for sure but some things that would be pretty basic with traditional methods I don't know yet like, things like 'if.' I don't think I'm mixing up starting consonants anymore, but ending consonants aren't always clear to me and I can't tell what tones things are reliably even though I can tell similar words have different tones.

I can definitely understand whole phrases and sometimes even compound sentences with 'but' and 'because' but then there will be plenty of sentences I don't get at all. I have found myself able to look away from videos for a while and still follow everything fine in most cases, which wasn't true until recently. I've been experimenting with watching native content instead of content for learners, like sewing tutorials mostly, but my comprehension of that is pretty low. I did make a nice pencil case based on visuals alone though.

I still really like this method and I don't mind not being able to speak much, although I do think I want to start learning to read earlier than recommended. I keep starting and stopping trying to learn the alphabet.

I have list of shows waiting for when I feel like I'm ready to start watching things without subtitles, mostly the ones I only sort of care about so it doesn't matter if I only understand 60% of what's going on. I'm still watching way too many Thai shows at the moment.

[ilsestudiesstudying]

Can you please share some of your resources for learning thai? I really want to start but can't seem to find anything reliable. Thanks🤗

Hi! For sure I can :D Studying Thai is not a priority for me at the moment, but I do keep up with it in the background. The book i'm using is Thai for Beginners by Benjawan Poomsan Becker. It also has a CD but I bought the book without CD. All of the audio on the CD is also conveniently on Spotify!

For online resources I really only use ThaiPod101. They have a great course on learning the alphabet that has helped immensely. On the website it is a monthly subscription but they also have loads of free content (on the site and on YouTube)!

For listening practice I watch Thai series and movies as well as listening to a lot of Thai music. (this is my Thai playlist on Spotify if you're interested: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1aX2i2itjyoMZeoWP1bD3Q?si=065ac863a05245cb )

And that's pretty much it right now. Please don't hesitate to ask any other questions. I'm sorry for the slow response in advance. I'm not great at keeping up with Social media...

[squeakygeeky]

600 hours/1 year of Thai

It's just under a year actually and I hit my goal for the year. I've been learning Thai will the 'ALG method' which is all about immersion. I mostly use this channel and I also take 1-2hrs of listening webinars a week. I'm currently on intermediate content. The transition from beginner was okay, but my comprehension levels feel on the lower side and they don't feel like they're improving that noticeably. It could just be that I'm pretty bored of lessons at this point.

I recently tried re-watching Lovely Writer and then He's Coming to Me without subtitles. I'm not sure why, but Lovely Writer felt easier. Maybe because there aren't any voiceovers and the non-romance vocabulary was centered on writing and film, which I'm more familiar with than heart conditions and funerary practices. I guess Lovely Writer also stuck in my head more, even though I had only watched each series one time. There were only a few points where I wished I actually understood, because I couldn't remember exactly what had been said in the scene. With He's Coming to Me I was more lost. Also it had more traffic noise picked up with the dialogue. I do think I will continue re-watching shows for a lot of my input. Even if my comprehension isn't that high, I'm wayyyy more engaged so it's worth it. I do think watching a whole series without subtitles is a ways off and I'd be too confused to get drawn in at all. I do watch a Thai game show with talented kids called Super 10 sometimes and I recommend it to anyone at an intermediate or higher Thai level. It's pretty easy to understand.

I still do watch shows with subtitles and it's with that where I really feel the progress I'm making because sometimes I forget for a minute to put subtitles on until the dialogue gets past basic phrases. However I'm still not logging that as part of my learning hours so the 600 number is really 600+.

I think part of the struggle now is that I don't feel like I'm picking up a lot of new words. Instead I think I'm getting grammar and cadence and the different ways that words I recognized are actually used. The way people talked to each other in terms of pronouns and particles was something I was already interested in and had explicitly learned a bit about, but now it's really obvious and one of my favorite things to pay attention to. The way Gene and Sib talk to each other feels absolutely wild now.

I was going to work on learning the alphabet more, but right now all I can really do is sound something out to see if the word is what I think it is. I may start learning to read more seriously even though it's not recommended by the ALG method to start yet (for accent reasons, which don't really matter given my lack of anyone Thai to talk to lol). I am really curious how I would fare in conversation if I actually tried. I do think I could talk about more than fruit.

There's a part of me that wonders if I should actually just stop, or cut back a lot. I don't need to know Thai, and this was partly an experiment on myself, which I think I can call a success. Meanwhile I actually need and use Spanish and I haven't been making much progress there, and a part of me still wants to learn Vietnamese (or one of about 2-5 other languages depending on my mood). But also, I like Thai and in another year I think I could watch shows without subtitles comfortably, and at that level I could stop trying to learn at all and would probably still improve.

[squeakygeeky]

Three months of Thai

I've reached a weird point where listening to Thai, even native content like unsubbed actor interviews, definitely feels like I'm listening to normal speech with words, but where only some of those words are familiar and only some of them have real meaning to me. Definitely a contrast to Vietnamese, where I can pick out a few basic words, but it still just sounds alien overall, and Spanish where I understand the majority of what I hear. What I do know isn't just nouns and a few verbs, I've started catching functional things like 'but' and 'like this.'

I did have an actual lesson where I spoke enough to answer yes/no questions and say how may things I had and what color, so I feel like that proved to myself that speaking can naturally arise out of listening to a some degree. I do have another lesson tomorrow but I'm thinking of stopping. It's making this feel a little more like a REAL THING I'm doing and not just a weird little side project and I'm not sure how much mental capacity I have for taking on a REAL THING right now because REAL THINGS can make me stressed in a way thing things that aren't really a thing don't.

I'm sick of beginner content, but I'm not ready for anything more interesting, so I just have to plow through. I'll have some much less time/energy after this coming weekend so no more 2hrs a day, I'll be lucky to manage 1 and I'm sad about that despite how much of a slog it can feel like. There's also a part of me that wants to try a new language now now now, but I also love Thai and would miss it.

[squeakygeeky]

Does anyone know of children's chapter books translated into or written in Thai that they could recommend? Something around a 10 year old's reading level. Asking for a friend, not me, I'm still illiterate. She can read at a higher level, but it's it's very slow.

[ilsestudiesstudying]

7/6/21

[ilsestudiesstudying]

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