Everyday Thai for Beginners

There's the occasional error, but overall, this textbook is one of the best ways to learn conversational Thai. It won't help you learn the alphabet or certain pronunciations, since it assumes you've learned those before reading this textbook. And it's a very reasonable assumption. It's incredibly hard to learn Thai from transliterated guides, since it shields you from the nuances of the language and why certain sounds come out as they do.I've jumped through a lot of different Thai learning guides and this one is by far the most comprehensive and easy to understand. The rules I assumed were exceptions turn out to be following very carefully constructed rules. If you're looking to learn Thai from a textbook, this is probably the best book for it.ขอบใจนะ

This book presents the mechanics of Thai structure thoroughly and straightforwardly. It will be a challenge with no romanized translations--good! Very valuable book to be used for years to come. A learning tool and reference book in one. Printed beautifully. Thanks!

I decided long ago that in order to learn Thai I would have to learn to read Thai; it was a decision that I came to after picking up and buying many little books and booklets with names like - Thai in 24Hrs - etc. as well as more serious tomes. The difficulty with these books is that the font size for both English and Thai is very small, usually with the English and Transliterated English in Bold face and the Thai in Normal or Light face....The problem remains for these books; each publisher seems to go to great lengths to develop their own CODE for Transliteration use of the normal English Alphabet to try and represent the sounds and phonetics of the Thai Language, and therein lies the problem. If one wants to learn to pronounce Thai correctly then one has to learn The Transliteration Code for that publisher; and since there are many publishers, and each one has their own valuable phrases to add to ones small vocabulary, along with their own Transliteration code; the various codes have to be learned..... I figured that it would be far more beneficial to only have to learn one CODE, the only one that correctly transliterates the phonetics of Thai to pronunciation - The Thai Alphabet and Thai Vowels and Tone Rules.This is where this book - Everyday Thai for Beginners - starts....It is a book written for the serious student of Thai.I have been travelling backwards and forwards, to and fro Thailand for a number of years, never staying long enough to really study the language properly, but often enough to have picked up many little phrase books, as I mentioned above.After making the decision to learn the written language I bought some Flash Cards for the Thai Alphabet and Vowels, and started to memorise them; next came the Tones and Tone rules, which I am still working on.There are many web-sites where one can listen and read the Thai Alphabet and Vowels; for the tones and for the Mouth Shapes and Tongue positions and glides etc. etc. one really needs a native Thai speaker to help you.I am living in Thailand, and so getting help, although not easy, who has the time? at least it is possible, and assists in meeting and getting to know some helpful people who are, usually, also interested in learning to speak and pronounce English correctly; a mutual exhange!The CD and lesson and exercise structures for the rest of the book, seem to be well structured and produced using the most upto date methods for the teaching of second languages, as in TEFL or TESOL, though this would be TTFL or TTSOL.All together.a very good book and suited to use by Teachers and Students alike.... A very good text-book.

If you have the chance to take Thai from Professor Kesavatana-Dohrs, take it! She wrote her own textbook because she didn't like how all of the other ones wrote things out phonetically in Roman letters as well as in Thai. I think it's a way better way to learn, and the book layout is really nice too.

The book is required for a university class I'm taking taught by the author of this book.

As others have said, this is a great book that doesn't rely on transliteration. The learner needs to be aware that merely memorizing the characters and tone rules in the preface will almost certainly not be enough to allow one to get comfortably through the rest of the book. One really has to learn the writing system well so that they are not constantly struggling when they should be learning vocabulary and grammar.I really like the reviewer Aidan McDowell's suggestion - learn the writing system by using Becker's first book, or perhaps her first 2 books. There is no shame or even damage in starting with transliteration, as another poster seems to claim. This is not Japanese kana. This is not Russian cyrillic. This is the hardest alphabet in use (Chinese characters aren't considered an alphabet), and takes many hours, spread out over many weeks, to get comfortable with it. Going through the first Becker book will give you vocabulary and grammar to reinforce the writing system as you learn it. The second book only provides transliteration for new vocabulary, thus weening the learner off of transliteration. At this point you will finally be good enough to use Everyday Thai for Beginners (ETB).So why use ETB at all? After all, Becker is a beginner text too.1) ETB covers more grammar, more vocabulary, and is better organized. It is written more like one would expect a western text book to be written, making it friendlier in many ways.2) Thai is a difficult language. Covering the same material in a different way, this time without transliteration, is very helpful reinforcement.It's a great text, but like so many texts, it comes with a not-so-useful CD. Ok many other language texts only attempt to give recordings of vocabulary and sentences in the book. This one does a little more, by doing some drills and patterns. But there is some really strange stuff here.1) long vowels are way over pronounced. I understand the need to give good examples to distinguish long and short vowels, but this is ridiculous. The male speaker is fine. The female speaker does all the over-pronouncing, and unfortunately, it goes beyond long vowels. She also quite often pronounces too slowly. Very unnatural, and it's not recommended to imitate her.2) there are 2 female announcers (I'm not talking about voice actors here). The native english speaker says the word "Patterns!" in a way that ensures the listener she wants to kill you. The native Thai speaker pronounces two phrases in English so poorly it took me a long time to figure out what she was saying. "question words" and "miscellaneous". I thought she was speaking Thai. It's worth buying the book just to hear this strange pronunciation - it cracks me up every time:)3) This is the most important one. IMO, a CD should be able to stand alone. You should be able to play it in your car, without looking at the book, and use it. It's not so hard to design something like this, although I admit it would be more work that what they did here. Give us something we will find useful by itself, and we will play it again and again. Reading off a list of words and sentences in Thai is better than nothing, but not much.

Not at all what the title says very complex

Too advance for the beginners!!

Very good book for the beginner. Since there is no translitteration used in this book, reading skills must be acquired prior to starting off on this book. The total lack of transliteration in this book might be considered bad for some, but I will advise everyone to start learning to read at the very beginning when learning Thai language. There is not very many long texts in this book, but the grammar part is great and the book game me a very good overall impression.

Sehr gutes Buch, vorausgesetzt man beherrscht das Lesen von Thaischrift bereits (keine Lautschrift angegeben). Thematisch aufgebaut, Vokabeln im Kontext zu lernen ist sehr sinnvoll. Auch kommt die Grammatik nicht zu kurz.