TOP 3 Reasons Thai is the HARDEST language to learn
Are you learning the Thai Language and you are struggling? You are not alone. The Thai language is a very difficult language for English speakers and native speakers of other languages as well. The Thai tones are difficult and hard. The best resources for learning the Thai language are very few. You may even start asking yourself why are all the resources are so terrible?! Also, you already know that Thai language is a tonal language meaning that saying the wrong tone will change the meaning of the word completely. Now, we have a lot of different accents for second language learners of English worldwide. However, some local Thai people have NEVER heard someone who is not Thai speaking their language. This makes understanding strong accents to become very difficult for the native speakers. The way you sound in Thai will need to be at a high level to be easily understood throughout Thailand.
On top of all of these difficulties, the Thai alphabet and its rules are not easily. As someone who learnt many alphabets and scripts, I actually find the Thai alphabet to be challenging upfront. Hence, I have focused on speaking and listening comprehension first. It would be very hard to read before you hear all the sounds and sentence patterns. Kids learn from listening first as well.
Resources:
1. www.fsi-language-courses.org/...
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Hey, I'm Thai, and I speak most of the western European languages myself (polyglot or not, I'll remain modest on that). So I hope I can add some feedback.
Actually, Thai consonants are very systematic too. Consonant system in this region (except those that have been romanized like Indonesian, etc) are based on the Indian languages/system. Googling "Thai Devanagari" should be a good starting point. Stuart Jay Raj also made very good videos covering that. You'll see the 5×5 grid of sounds plus a few other sounds outside the grid. The grid can tell you all the sounds (plosive, aspirated, nasal) and classes (high, middle, low). (The tone marks of different classes represent different tone sounds.)
thank you for this video krap 🙏
Regarding learning materials: were you able to find any good Thai grammar books? If so, could you make a video with your recommendations?
I kinda disagreed with the Thai alphabet being difficult until you mentioned the "W" letters... the P vs F sounds, the inside loop vs outside loop, and the W with a long tail vs not...ya I just had to memorize that, no other way. And drawing a few of the vowel forms that go above the letters...sometimes not easy. I switched to a very fine point fountain pen, and that helped a lot. You just HAVE to get away from transliteration ("romanization") ASAP. There's no other way to do this. All the books are wrong. One thing you could add as a "complaint", is that the sound of a letter can change based on its position. Thats why you get bad transliterations like "Sawasdee". And, although Thai is read left to right...that's not actually true either. It's actually left to right...from the first consonant! So "ไก่" for instance is actually right to left!
I agree with everything you say as it reflects my own experience. The beginner materials are 99% terrible quality. The authors seem to have no understanding of the challenges that learners face and I feel the production quality reflects a desire to get the books into the market as quickly as possible in order to make money. I would almost go so far as to say that most beginner materials are close to being scams. They are a terrible starting point for a serious learner of Thai and you have to go through a process of unlearning misunderstandings created by these books. There are also consistent language bloopers ... which lead to competent teachers (such as Grace) producing videos called "Mistakes many foreigners make" ... these 'mistakes' are things that the entry level books TELL US TO SAY! (Sorry for shouting!) It's like there's this weird 'foreigner version' of Thai that beginner books agree on but which you have to unlearn as you advance. (Interestingly, in my experience, tourism operators in areas like Phuket actually understand this 'foreigner version' more than someone making a real effort, but failing, to speak correctly.) On that topic, Stuart Jay Raj's most recent video is about whether or not you actually
What in the mind of non-natives is almost the same word and can't be understood by Thais, what SEEMS "almost the same pronounciation" is a completely different pronounciation to native Thai
I'm Brazilian and I've learned English, Italian, Japanese, I've been learning Vietnamese for 4 years and even just started Mandarin.
I respectfully disagree Thai is the hardest to learn. I believe Chinese is levels more difficult due to a lack of a phonetic alphabet (it’s a bunch of pictograms instead). So you have to memorize the character, pronunciation and tone of the word. With Thai, you can read a word and know how to pronounce the word (including tone) from reading the “letters”.
Learn the Thai letters before learning the language, at least to the point you can identify them, because the many romanization systems are a headache.
the thumbnail is giving me a panic attack
Vietnamese
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Thai language is the HARDEST language to learn ?? That is just so incredible clickbait !