Question:
I am a westerner and went to schools to learn thai. They all have
english typed words prnounced as thai where a Thai friend of mine and
I went to four schools and they all started out with an english font
book also. How can a Thai person learn english using a study guide
with english fonts very easily? I know children learn this way but
they don't have a language already as a Thai does. I would think a
Thai would best learn english as a westerner would learn Thai by a
book written in fonts they understand and spelled the way they would
pronounce them. Sure this makes it easier for the western teachers to
teach and I would guess it would take a long time to learn since
english is said to be one of the most difficult languages to teach and
it is also said that most (Americans) don't have a great usage of
their own language and newspapers are written in ... what... the sixth
grade level I think.
Answer:
If I understand you correctly, I think that you ask an interesting
question, or at least one I've never heard before. I get your drift as
this: Most English speakers start learning Thai by transliterating Thai
words to English script. Therefore, wouldn't it make sense for a Thai
person to start learning English by transliterating English words with
Thai script? I have several comments:
1) Many English-Thai dictionaries (including So Sethaputra's classic
work), immediately following the word entry, do have the word
transliterated to Thai script for purpose of indicating correct
pronunciation. So what you suggest is done in dictionaries.
2) Some English words (though not most, because I understand that the
Thai government has a regualatory language board that creates unique Thai
words much as the French do to preserve their culture) are direct
transliterations to Thai. This happens most often with product brand
names, e.g. "Coke," "Pepsi," and "Breeze" detergent.
3) Practically all Thai people have English classes throughout elementary
and secondary level education. Most Thai people are familiar with the
English alphabet and some rudimentary conversational phrases. Of course,
some such as the older generation or the hill-people may not have that
formal education. As you surely know, most of us farang get hooked into a
fair amount of casual English language tutoring with the kids as well as
business-oriented adults while we are over there. One of the running
jokes with my Thai friends is for me to say, in my clearest enunciation,
"Hello, how are you?" And they reply in their best enunciation they can
manage, "I am fine, thank you." Then we have a hearty laugh, because they
know I'm teasing them :-))
4) I have a friend whom is receiving a grant to take an intensive Thai
language course in Chiang Mai this coming July and August. He is an ESL
(English as a Second Language) teacher based in the U.S., and he selected
Thai as his "model" language to use as a basis for understanding the
problems that face foreign language speakers. He already is an advanced
Thai language student, and is an ESL professional who has studied
numerous methods of language acquisition, so he is one of the right
people to ask. I will query him on this when I see him next Sunday, and
get his thoughts.
Kind of as an aside, I'll tell you about an interesting discovery that I
made regarding your comment about the difficulty of learning English as a
second language. My son Mark is 10 years old; he is a native-born
American. Each week the kids get a 20 word English "spelling list" in
school. A few months ago, he had a list with most of the irregular
"-ough" words. It was amazing. Cough, though, thought, tough, throughout;
few of them had the same sound. Consider the fact that native-born
American children diligently spend twelve years just to learn their own
language . . .
After 3-1/2 years of taking classes on an on-and-off basis, I have
finally discovered a parallel difficulty with Thai language. Fortunately,
the elementary make-up of the phonetic pronunciation of the consonants
and vowels and tones are fairly regular and straighforward. And it is a
blessing that one does not have to conjugate Thai verbs, which absolutely
put me off of Spanish, French and German. In my opinion, King Ramkamhaeng
did an excellent job :-)) The hurdle with Thai, and I think I've finally
cracked the *right* approach, is to realize that usage in Thai language
is highly idiomatic. The key I've discovered to learning conversation is
not to read it word-by-word, but to memorize it at the phrase level.
Breaking the speech down mono or bi-syllabic words can come later, and
much more easily after having learned it at the full phrase level. A more
blunt way to put this is that I have concluded that translating Thai
word-for-word is often a fruitless trap. I intuit that is a large part of
the reason that Thai monks, as well as modern Thai language teachers,
emphasize learning long passages of conversation by wrote memorization.
I don't use Thai script on my computer, because of mechanical
difficulties of not having a Thai keyboard, etc. But I can quickly
demonstrate a couple examples of that latter point: Have you learned the
20 words that use the vowel mai-arai and the clever mnemonic passage for
memorizing them (get it if you haven't, readily available and a fun
read)? Another classic would be in some of King Bhumipol's speeches about
how he suggests to his subjects the proper way to order their family,
personal and business relationships; many of those phrases contain
standard forms of usage that do not lend themselves to word-by-word
translation.
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