Danny's Weblog

2006 Feb 02 [ Thu ]

Good Wikipedia articles on Thai

I ran into this while looking at Cambodian: en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_language]

I am kicking myself for not checking Wikipedia before I created my Thai Tone Chart. Wikipedia has a very good section on Thai which comes close to my own efforts. Oh well, at least now I can check it.

Among the other links is a list of Thai particles: www.geocities.com [http://www.geocities.com/siamsmile365/thaiparticles/thaiparticles.htm] which is the first place I've seen "nia" listed.

2006 Jan 15 [ Sun ]

My new free PDF booklet "THAITONES" for reading Thai tones

Download here: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/pdfs/tonechart.pdf]

When I started learning to read Thai the tone system was introduced shortly after the character set. I gave it a shot, but I found myself completely overwhelmed with trying to remember all the different details necessary to deduce the correct tone for each syllable. I gave up.

However, I continued to practice reading Thai, and I always had in mind to get back to the tone issue. A couple of years ago my good buddy Jack gave me a copy of a table he had copied from another book. I was very interested as the table seemed so compact, but I actually still did not understand it.

Recently I tried again, and got a fuller explanation from Jack. This time I figured it out. It may have helped that I now find it much easier to *distinguish* Thai characters than when I started!

The basic idea that you need to understand to use my chart is this: while the tone marks do not *directly* imply the tone, they *usually* do (ie, except for low-class consonants). So you can call each mark by the *usual* resulting tone, ie:

maai eek LOW

maai thoo FALLING

maai trii HIGH

maai jattawaa RISING

(Incidentally on this webpage I am using casually romanized Thai, but on the PDF I used my phonetic font "PKD" .)

Then in my chart the boldface "High" means a resulting high tone, whereas an ordinary "High" (in the "Add tone mark?" column) means "you can add the maai trii / high tone mark to get a high tone".

This allows a tremendous simplification of the tone rules. Several books require four to eight pages of different rules. This table shows that there are really only ten separate rules you need to learn.

I've provided a list of consonants in each class on the main tone table itself for convenience. I've also provided full tables of consonants, including their names and features, and vowels.

I did not include the two obsolete consonants and those funny characters that you only ever see in the word "angkhit".

It was not easy to fit everything in. In particular, Thai script tends to commandeer wide vertical margins which waste a lot of space. I had to do a lot of nudging.

If you find any errors please let me know. I am particularly concerned about the vowels, especially those including "waw wairn" and "yaw yairk". My textbooks were vague, contradictory and plain wrong about vowels. It also worries me that the "waw wairn" is also used for consonant clusters. Does anybody know which rule takes precedence there?

Incidentally, I *still* don't think beginners should try to absorb the tone system immediately. But if – like me – you can already read some Thai but have never figured out the tone systems, I'm pretty confident you'll love THAITONES.

A few notes on the layout: I chose the largest size that I felt was convenient to fit in a shirt pocket. I believe you should carry this chart at all times for several weeks and actually use it on real Thai to convince yourself it works. The size is actually 85 x 125 mm per page, which fits neatly in a plastic protector which appears to be intended for holding copies of one's passport. This makes it slow to reach the inside pages, but normally only the main tone chart needs to be referred to, which is on the "back cover".

I have found that the plastic protector actually tends to adhere to the laser print over the course of a week or two, making it hard to remove the booklet without damaging the print (and leaving a partial image on the plastic). You may want to apply some sort of gloss spray to the booklet first.

When you print it out, *make sure that the printer is set for the actual paper size*. Allow Adobe Reader to auto-center it (which of course screws up if Adobe is misinformed about the actual paper size in the printer). I have checked it out on A4 paper but I believe it will still be usable on letter size, although crop marks may disappear. Make sure that Adobe prints it out at 100%.

Cut out the 4 pages with a 5mm margin on all sides as indicated by the crop marks. I use a roller cutter for nice clean straight cuts inside the sheet edges, but scissors will do. Then fold into four, with the consonant and vowel tables on the inside (which is why they look upsidedown on the PDF).

It is also possible to print the page twice, so that you wind up with two copies on a single sheet of paper. You need to experiment (and, if you're anything like me, waste several sheets of paper) trying to figure out how to feed the sheet the second time so that things wind up in the right place. Additionally, you will probably discover that the registration of your computer between passes is quite inconsistent. It really needs to be better than 2mm in all dimensions to avoid blatant misalignment. Anyway, I find that folding the paper adds stiffness to the booklet which I consider preferable.

2006 Jan 06 [ Fri ]

Using my new PKD font for Thai

A few weeks ago I announced my new phonetics font PKD: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Cambodia/Khmer-language/pkdannounce01.html]

It contains phonetic characters which allow you to easily represent the sounds of English, Cambodian and Thai. You access the non-ASCII characters simply by using the shift key, so the system just handles them as upper-case: you can easily send them through email etc without mangling them.

At the time I did not describe how to use the font with Thai. The previous announcement included a link to a description of how to access the consonants and vowels used for Cambodian, and these are sufficient for Thai, so in this posting the issue that I am addressing is some issues with the vowels, and of course the tones.

My principle was that I wanted to have one character for one sound, even though a single phoneme might have two sounds in different circumstances. Actually, phonetic systems are more complex than they might appear and this is a fundamental problem. It is very evident, for instance, in comparisons of British and American English, and you need to think about *both* forms of English when you put together a pronunciation guide intended to be useful for speakers of *either* language.

This principle has the effect of making me want to use a different form of the "a" vowel for the short and long sounds in Thai. This is *not* what other guides to Thai do. Indeed, I was not really aware of this issue until I was putting together this font and did some comparisons of the various texts. What they do is simply define the "aa" sound as being what we usually call in British English a "long" a sound, as in "car" or "Bach", whereas the "a" sound is not just a short version of this but a fundamentally different sound as in "cat" or "happy" (sometimes represented in English dictionaries as something like "ae", and which oddly enough the Thais themselves represent in turn with the same vowel as in the "pen" of "mai pen rai").

There is also an issue with the "o" sound. I like to reserve the "o" for the sound of "Roma" rather than "hot". (And it's essential to distinguish them in Khmer.)

With that out of the way, how are the tones represented?

I simply designed the font so that the letters L, M, H, R and F produce symbols for the low, medium, high, rising and falling tones respectively, and which are positioned over the *previous* character. This is easy to do in a font editor, and works particularly well because of course *all* my characters are lower-case. (I provided an explicit common-tone symbol, but of course using it is optional.)

For instance, the sentence "mai chai song naa, soong na khap!" ("not 'brothel', 'two'!") can be represented with tones as:

mAFi chAFi sOFG naMa, sOROG naH khaHp!

If you already have the font installed, you can see the result below; otherwise it will look the same as the "source code" above:

(Hmm; now that I look at this, it would seem I actually want to have a long "aa" sound here for the "naa". Oh well: at least with PKD we can argue about this.)

The only issue with this concept is alphabetization, ie sort order. After thinking about it for a while, I realized that I wasn't even sure what sort order I *wanted*. I took a look at Becker's excellent Thai/English dictionary, and could not even really make out what the effective sort order was. The Thais themselves think of them in the order low, falling, high, rising because the corresponding (in most cases) tone marks are named using the Sanskrit words for one, two, three, four; but they do not seem to think of the common tone as "tone zero".

I used to think that I wanted the order to be low, rising, common, falling, high, because that seemed like a logical progression, but I am now less confident that I know exactly where the tones really start and end.

Also, I think I would actually like to see the short and long vowels together, instead of being separated as they would usually be by English alphabetic order, because if I do not know a word already I find it hard to detect whether the duration is intended to be long or short.

Anyhow I concede that the sort order produced by using a simple sort (ie in MS Excel) on my font is pretty strange. On the other hand, because the "source code" for text in my font uses plain A-Za-z, it should be exceptionally easy to write a routine which produces a massaged version of each word that *does* sort the way you want. Um, I haven't actually done that yet (Excel Basic – blecch).

2005 Jun 19 [ Sun ]

Tones affect consonants in Thai, so...?

A couple of years ago I speculated that Thai is a "tone-priority" language: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Language-misc/consonants02.html] by which I meant that tones are so important to meaning in Thai that they are pronounced canonically in all instances, necessitating that the *consonants* be adjusted to fit in.

It has recently occurred to me that this raises the possibility of an interesting experiment. One could record Thai, then digitally edit out *all* of the vowel. Conceivably Thais could reconstruct the vowel, tone or both, from the surrounding consonants alone! (You would need to use nonsense syllables to avoid providing other cues, of course... although I have found that if you ask a Thai to say a certain word with a different tone – thereby creating a nonsense syllable – he tends to lock up. My impression is that they *store* the correct pronunciation of actual words as a gestalt. Sometimes they can't even tell me what tone a (real) word is supposed to be!)

2005 Apr 06 [ Wed ]

Royal Thai romanization system -- Wikipedia entry

en.wikipedia.org [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Thai_General_System_of_Transcription]

2005 Apr 03 [ Sun ]

Where to find the official Royal Thai romanization guide

While reading the thai newsgroup (nntp://soc.culture.thai) I found the following:

From: kongaead@my-deja.com (Bent Jensen)

Organization: http://groups.google.com

Date: 30 Mar 2005 18:51:48 -0800

Subject: Re: Royal Thai General Transcription System

"IanT" wrote ...

> I'm trying to get a copy of the "Royal Thai General Transcription System",

> I've searched the web without any luck. Does anyone have a copy or know of

> anyone who might have access to one.

You can have a set of copies of it made at the library of the Royal Thailand Institute located in Soi Asoke opposiote Soi Cowboy but a little further down the soi. I think the house number is 138. The library is upstairs.

I once did that. The young library lady looked like a question mark when I asked for the translitteration system of the Royal Thailand Institute. So I found it myself on the shelves in the Transactions of the Institute, year 1939. (A revision probably can be found in a more recent volume.)

It's occurred to me that since the Bangkok Post insists on *using* the Royal romanization they might have a page describing it.

2005 Mar 28 [ Mon ]

Interesting free software for romanizing Thai

What this is supposed to do is take Thai text in Thai characters – either using the Win98-style special Thai character sets, or there is also a version for W2K/XP-style Unicode character sets – and produce a romanized (not translated!) version.

www.arts.chula.ac.th [http://www.arts.chula.ac.th/~ling/tts/download.html]

I heard about this on the Thailand newsgroup. Several posters have tried it and can't get it to work.

Even if it does work, it is mainly intended to create romanized text in the absurd royal romanization format, although there is some kind of option for representing eg vowel length more explicitly. Still, I would like to look at the docs to see how they handle eg detecting word boundaries.

About 5 MB download. When I tried I got about 1 kB/s, so I gave up; may try again later.

...Hmmm... since writing the above, it occurred to me to try this URL: www.arts.chula.ac.th [http://www.arts.chula.ac.th/~ling/tts/] It brings you to a form where you can try the software on the fly with test phrases.

Fortunately my internet-cafe machine had Thai keyboard option, and I think the Iris font is a standard Thai font. This is how I was able to type in Thai:

Start - Programs - Accessories - System tools - Accessibility - On-Screen Keyboard

Select Settings – Font - Iris UPC Bold 18 pt

Click on the web form to get focus, but the on-screen keyboard will continue to display what you can type. In particular, when you press the shift key, the keycaps all change over.

Left-click on the "EN" indicator showing the current keyboard setting is English, and left-click on "Thai" in the popup menu. (Your keyboard software may not be set to keep the indicator on your bottom toolbar, in which case you will need to go into Control Panel. Also, the keyboard switching is more complex in XP and I don't have an XP here to check the details.)

Type in something in Thai – I picked "mai pen arai", possibly slightly mis-spelled – and press Submit. Initially I left it set to Royal Thai romanization.

After a wait of about a minute (!) it responded with a reasonable guess: "mai pen a rai". Incidentally, the results page url is: www.arts.chula.ac.th [http://www.arts.chula.ac.th/ling/cgi/tts/tts.pl] ie the form seems to be calling perl: interesting.

(Hmmm... I suppose it's conceivable that it's set to respond "mai pen a rai" whenever it can't figure out the actual answer: that would certainly be a very Thai response...)

It occurred to me I had forgotten the acent mark on the "mai" and I fixed it, but that didn't change the output.

I just tried IPA and it seemd to produce something reasonable too, with what appears to be a circumflex denoting a falling tone. Cool!

2004 Aug 03 [ Tue ]

Standards for romanizing Thai text

There was a letter in the Bangkok Post on 2004-07-29 which referred to the "Royal Institute's Romanization Guide for Thai Script (available at certain university bookstores)". The letter had a cute remark, something along the lines of "the King felt that tones were unnecessary because it was always possible to understand a word without them". I would have liked to quote the phrase directly but the Post's search system can no longer find such articles without making you sign up and pay money, so the heck with them.

Anyhow, today I did a Google search, and this link popped up:

www.links.nectec.or.th [http://www.links.nectec.or.th/www-new/uploads/upload/040035/cocosda99.ps]

Note that this is a Postscript format file; you can use Google to look at the text version (as I did), although Google does not try to represent the Thai characters in any useful way.

Later: Google has another link to a Word-format version (you probably need Thai fonts, including something called SILSophialPA which is missing from the machine I am using, where Thai Word 97 is installed): www-2.cs.cmu.edu [http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~ananlada/roman_1.doc]

Regrettably it does not contain an English version of the romanization guide, but it does contain a lot of discussion of difficulties in automatically producing any phonetic rendering of Thai script. I have to say I find it very irritating when teach-yourself guides burble about "don't worry if it seems difficult; just keep trying and soon it'll be easy!"; this text makes it clear just how tough it really is. In particular, it refers to the "segmentation" problem, ie determining where each syllable begins and ends: something which, as I recently said, I have only just begun to feel somewhat at ease with. (But there are still words like "haang sappasinkaa" which make my brows knot.)

The document does make a brief reference to the idea that the romanization should correspond to the *written* form in Thai rather than the *spoken* form. I imagine this is where forms like "sawasdee" come from. I have become somewhat more open to this argument now that I realize how important it is in English (for instance, if English had not standardized on certain spellings, we would have had as many forms of written English as there are dialects). Still, although I would have put up with almost any form of romanization if it had established itself as the standard, I think as a learner that principle would be very regrettable.

Likewise, I think it is just amazing that Nectec's proposed romanization scheme omits tone information: "the tones are omitted since the system will become too complicated". Tones are actually relatively *easy* to represent if your character set includes the common European accented vowels, as most do. It almost makes me wonder if Thais always have at the back of their minds that they need to preserve Thai as a secret code which keeps out farangs, and if they ever were to produce a form of romanization which was adequate to represent Thai it would drive out Thai script and weaken their secret code. But that would be paranoid.

Another issue that occurs to me when I read the Nectec document is that they clearly didn't get it edited by someone with native English. That suggests that practically none of their *software design* is done in partnership with English speakers. That is probably why they are still pushing their ridiculous machine translation schemes.

Amazon lists the romanization guide as 26 pages for 9.95 USD – phew!

2004 Apr 22 [ Thu ]

General review of books for people learning Thai

I started this document a long time ago and have been too lazy to bring it up to date. I thought I'd post it anyway, but I backdated it to the beginning of this year, rather than having it appear in the current postings.

www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Thailand/Thai-language/thaibooks1.html]

2004 Mar 28 [ Sun ]

Free software to learn Thai typing

"The Nation" 2004-03-28 gave the following link: download.thaiware.com [http://download.thaiware.com/program8/ThaiType.exe] (1,159 kB)

However, thaiware.com returned a page of Thai text that I think said you can't link directly into a download page, you have to search from their home page. I tried that; it took a long time (about 2 minutes!) for the page's "search" button to appear (so I clicked on "submit program" but that's for software authors!) and then it couldn't find "thaitype"!

So I googled and found this, which looks similar: www.users.bigpond.com [http://www.users.bigpond.com/gurce/thai/type/] You don't need any special Thai-language setup to use this. It includes a grahic showing the Thai layout on your keyboard.

I haven't tried this but it looks cool.

2004 Feb 08 [ Sun ]

Learning to read Thai: analogy to declarative computer languages

Most computer languages, like Basic, C and Perl, are procedural. You tell the computer each step to carry out, and then it does it.

But there is another kind of computer language: the declarative language like Prolog, or SQL. In this kind of language you tell the computer what the *rules* are for its behavior, then *it* figures out the optimum way to act in conformity with that specification.

When you learn to read Thai, the rules that they give you are like the specifications in SQL. Crucially, they *don't* automatically give you a sequence of instructions to follow.

Because Thai is normally written without spaces between the words, it's a considerable task merely to be able to parse a paragraph into words. Here's my own *procedural* parser:

1. Examine the first character. (Thai uses many diacritic marks so the definition of the term *character* is actually not obvious. I guess I mean "that bunch of stuff which takes up one character position".)

2. Compare the character to a table of words. If the character matches note a word boundary and continue.

3. If not, append the next character and go to "1".

Of course this is cheating, but it probably works quite well. It would work much less well in other languages where nouns, verbs, and for all I know prepositions undergo changes in form within the word due to conjugation, declension etc.

Of course, this doesn't work for a human learner. You can't possibly memorize the spelling of twenty thousand Thai words before you learn to read Thai. But I'd like to see the code which could implement the specifications given in language textbooks.

I think it would still have to start off with a table of single-character words. But then you could add rules about which two consonants can appear together, and which signify a missing vowel, etc. By the way, I feel that issue has really been neglected in the textbooks, but it's crucial to guessing the pronunciation of an unknown word.

Likewise, just distinguishing between characters really deserves a procedural description. I have been thinking of writing up a guide to distinguishing bewteen similar characters, as I've noticed I've recently become much better at correctly reading characters in a nonstandard font. Incidentally it seems to me that the differentiation between the standard Thai body text fonts and the "sans serif" varieties corresponds to the difference between adding error correction code and cutting the bit rate. Ie the standard varieties, with multiple hints to allow you to distinguish between characters in the presence of noise, require more bandwidth but reject noise better. The sans-serif fonts reduce the points of differentiation between characters to the minimum, but (presumably) continue to work in a low-bandwidth channel.

2004 Jan 26 [ Mon ]

Review of "English-Thai Bar Guide"

This is a blue pocket-size book. The cover has "Bar Guide" in big white letters and a cartoon of a plump farang in a bar wowing the bargirls by being able to say "phom rak khun mak mak".

I bought this book even though several problems are evident from a glance.

1. Not only does the romanization not indicate tones, it has no pronunciation guide at all! So probably most hapless customers will pronounce "phom" "fom".

2. The slant of the marketing seems doomed to failure. Guys may assume bar girls will like it when you try out your Thai on them, but they will smile and laugh *whatever* you say. Actually, you will probably do better pretending you speak no Thai at all. The makers of the book are probably aware of this.

3. The book is not very well organized. The book is divided into sections, but many phrases could fit into several different sections. I don't have "Thai for Lovers" in front of me, but I was not conscious of that problem with TFL. In other words, it's hard to guess which section to turn to if you need a particular phrase (even if you remember seeing it).

4. Background information is scattered through the book. The locations chosen are not terrible but again not particularly helpful. There is a list of contents which gives the section titles, but again this is not very helpful. How does one *know* one would like to read about "Soi Thaniya" unless one happened to be there? Likewise, many newcomers won't know what "bar fine" means (any more than "bar beer") and won't check it out in advance, which they definitely should.

If it were up to me, I'd collect the background info sections together but provide *references* to them, in the phrases sections.

5. I got the impression the background info sections were located to fill up white space. For instance, what is the info on "katoeys" doing in the "you're so cute" phrase section? They got so desperate they threw in a full-page ad for another (equally shoddy) book on p133. That's *in addition to* three pages of ads at the rear of the book – where the designer has sloppily allowed the chapter heading "bar pickup phrases" to continue to run as the page heading!

6. Despite making such efforts to fill white space, the layout is inefficient and there is little material per page.

So why did I pay money for it? Because the phrases themselves are not bad, and the price at 195 THB, while exorbitant for such a small and badly-produced book, made it an impulse buy.

I certainly wouldn't recommend it for *any* first-time visitor to Thailand, though.

2004 Jan 12 [ Mon ]

Link to old but good page with Thai localization issues

"Localization" is the process of adapting a product, usually software, to be used in a foreign market.

Here's a link to a page which discusses many issues involved in localizing for the Thai market. Its only drawback is that it was last updated in 1998-10! Still, it's certainly interesting to know that even an old version of Word sorted *only on the first character*.

qtranslation.com [http://qtranslation.com/ttrans/english/thailoc1.htm]

Another good page for using computers with Thai: seasrc.th.net [http://seasrc.th.net/main/main.htm]

Regrettably it too is very old (1995!) It's worth looking through though. Check out this (unfortunately .gif – oh, I see they also have it as .eps!) chart showing Thai pronunciation and tone rules: seasrc.th.net [http://seasrc.th.net/card/th_con1.gif]

Here's another good page, with eg reviews of Thai dictionaries: www.thai-language.com [http://www.thai-language.com/default.asp?tab=5#faq]

2004 Jan 09 [ Fri ]

Colloquial Thai

This is a book by John Moore and Saowalak Rodchue, published by Routledge.

I might have been able to state the publication date, but as I was writing down the above a girl rushed up to me in Bookazine and told me I wasn't allowed to take notes. I complied, in some astonishment. I asked her why a couple of times and she just repeated "policy". I've shopped there hundreds of times and never had this problem (or anywhere else in the world). I'm aware that some stores forbid cameras and noting prices, because pricing is valuable information for other stores, but I hardly think that's the issue here. I wonder what it could be?

Perhaps they are worried that someone is going to post a negative review on the Internet, which is in fact their doom.

You can tell I've only flipped through the book. The general production is similar to the "Colloquial Cambodian" book (Smyth) and I was getting interested until I realized that the romanization includes no tone marks! I had time to find and note down the stated reason for this: "...as you should try to learn the tone with each new word". (They *do* specify the tone when each word is introduced the first time, but not subsequently.)

This excuse is utterly preposterous.

My guess is that the original text *did* have tone symbols, but when they got to prepress the faggot in charge of design wanted to go to a different font, and at this point they discovered that the tone marks didn't come through. Rather than actually fix that problem they just got the author to manually rekey the tone marks in the vocabulary lists, as he probably got a little testy when they asked him to rekey the whole text.

To be fair I am starting to realize that this whole romanization issue is by no means as straightforward as I at first thought. You may, for instance, have noticed that I have eschewed tone marks in my own text...

2004 Jan 07 [ Wed ]

Review of "Thai for English-Speaking Learners"

I saw this book the other day in a Thai bookstore and being ever-hopeful that there might be a book which would allow me to learn Thai without doing real work I bought it, even though it was quite expensive – I think 295 B (no price was marked on the cover).

1. This book was written by a Thai: "Tipawan Thampusana-Abold". It has the usual wobbly English so the major interest is its insights into Thai from the inside.

2. I was congratulating myself on detecting germanic coloration in the English when I got to the end of the book and found a short bio of the author which mentions she moved to Germany in 1990 (the book was first published in 1995).

It doesn't refer to her husband so presumably he had separated from her by the time the book came out.

3. The English in the book is clearly strongly influenced by German, but it's hard for me to estimate whether her German husband edited it. At a guess, he did, because the general phrasing has too much "Sprachgefuehl" to have been written by a Thai alone.

4. Examples of germanicisms: "The cassette is absolutely needed" (absolut noetig); "helping verb" meaning auxiliary verb; use of "already" (see below).

5. Indeed the cassette *is* "absolutely needed", but the edition I bought had no cassette, and there was no sign of one in the store, and I saw no mention of it on the cover. You need it (assuming you buy the book to use rather than for peripheral amusement) because although the book includes a gloss for Thai consonants it has no explanation of Thai vowels and nothing useful on the tones.

6. As stated, this book is quite interesting because of its Thai-centric viewpoint, but the grasp of English grammar is slipshod. For instance, there is a useful discussion of equivalents to English tenses which is spoiled by an inadequate grasp of English (although Americans will be less upset because their grammar is closer to German).

Eg p41: "The younger brother ate already". This is OK in US English but in English it should of course be "the younger brother has already eaten".

Perhaps more seriously (also p41): "he has already studied Thai for 2 years": this should be "he has been studying Thai for two years". (The "2" is also germanic; in English "two" is preferred.)

This section regrettably omits the useful "yuu" construction to express the present continuous mood.

7. The author's grasp of how hard it is to learn to read Thai is laughable. It is utterly unrealistic to drop transliteration so rapidly.

Lesson 6 p105: "Anyway the most important thing is that you must be able to distinguish and pronounce the 5 tones correctly. If you need more practice, just go back to lesson III, page 33." Bwahahaha!

Lesson 6 p108: "The tone rules are really complicated, aren't they? Please do not feel discouraged. Study the table with explanations slowly and carefully a few times, then you will master them. After this lesson, you can be sure that you can read or pronounce almost every word in this tonal language so correctly that even the Thai will definitely feel surprised." Double bwahahaha!

8. Despite my carping, I do not feel my money was wasted. The discussions of how to address an envelope; classifiers; pronouns; and spelling/pronunciation issues were all very interesting.

9. My copy was labelled "3rd printing – Publisher's number 11/2000 – 1,000 copies". That's interesting right there. Publishing teach-yourself-Thai books does not seem to be the royal road to riches.

2004 Jan 01 [ Thu ]

Learning Thai

1. Introduction

This document describes products such as books and tapes for people learning Thai by themselves. I started writing it over a year ago and have incorporated some of the ideas in postings in the intervening period.

It's intended for people who have already started to learn Thai, but I would like people who have written or are considering writing such books to read it too. People who have not yet started to learn Thai will probably not understand many references. However, some of the points raised are valid for instructional materials for learning any foreign language.

At present this text consists of short allusive notes but I may extend it into a more readable form later.

The following is an overview of what you need to think about if you're considering writing such a book:

1. Need Thai and English collaborators

2. Need audio tapes integrated with the text

3. Need the services of a professional editor

4. Need a good dictionary and grammar as well as a lesson guide

5. Why don't people look at existing books before doing their own?

6. Need to provide advice on learning to read Thai (it's a lengthy and discouraging process)

2. Criteria for self-learning products

Index

This should be a separate issue from dictionary sections. You need to be able to look up things like "time" and "booking tickets" and "reported speech" and "provinces", not just "bus", if you want to say "did he say we'd have to cancel the tickets for Chantaburi before 11 am if we take the Chonburi bus?".

Eng-Thai dictionary

This should give the Thai both in transliteration and in Thai characters, plus some guide to usage, common errors etc. In particular, common phrases should be present such as "get up".

Thai-Eng dictionary (Thai transliterated)

Because most learners do not learn Thai script for a long time if ever, it is essential to provide a way to look up transliterated words.

If possible the sort order of the transliteration should allow someone who has not clearly distinguished the tone or duration of the word to look it up without excessive effort, but that's asking a lot.

Thai-Eng dictionary (Thai characters)

This is essential for several reasons:

1. Thai people need it to help you by looking up a word

2. Real Thai text, eg notices

Good choice of vocabulary (most common/useful first)

It seems to me most writers make amazingly bad choices about which vocabulary to introduce first, or indeed *at all* for beginners. "Basic Thai", for instance, gives "to feed, breed animals" on p49, but waits for "wait" till p208.

Attractive layout (clear headings, typeface)

Part of the problems found in the existing products must be the unusual type features needed for the transliteration, combined with the Thai script. Presumably these days everything has been done on computers for a long time, but "Basic Thai" has hand-added tone signs! This forces the layout to leave a large space between lines, which gaves a bare look to the pages.

The typeface often seems poorly chosen. Frequently the diacritic marks used for the tones are either too small to see or interfere with the main part of the letter. A type size chosen for the English text may require a Thai type size which is so small that Thai diacritics are practically invisible. (I have never seen an A4/letter-size Thai book but it might provide extra options.)

Descriptions of culture, geography etc

Although theoretically you can avoid this, practically it's a mistake. You need to address Thai attitudes to bargaining, tipping, shoes/feet, monks etc to choose the correct spoken and written forms in Thai.

You need a discussion of Thai provinces/government structure, and an explanation of Thai postal addresses (eg the pronunciation of "thap", the slash in Thai lot numbers).

Thai place names

For some reason they seem to be particularly wacky in their pronunciation. Also, many of them are easily confused.

Thai personal names

It's essential to list these, and define which are male and which are female, because written Thai provides no clue that a word is a name (unlike English which capitalizes them) so unless you *already* know it's a name you can't scan the sentence correctly.

Thai spellings of English names, places

Newspaper stories often include references to personalities like Britney Spears or President Bush, and it may be helpful to recognize their transliterations in Thai. Notes and signs may refer to the English names of shopping malls or bars. Eg "village" is often pronounced "villa". Some advice on these points may be helpful.

Consistent use of Thai together with transliterated characters

If the same form of transliteration were used in all the books this would be less important, but sometimes I need to see the actual Thai to know what the transliteration is trying to express.

Also, it's helpful in learning to read if you have a large amount of text in transliteration and Thai characters.

Consistent application of transliteration

I have found many examples of slipshod application of transliteration. Typically only the author really understands his own transliteration scheme, and even his hapless Thai collaborator cannot really edit it, so the text is typically, effectively, unedited. The Bua-Luang "English-Thai Dictionary" has many advantages but consistency is not among them.

Carefully edited

The text frequently does not seem to have been edited at all, even by someone who knows no Thai. A conscientious editor, for instance, would notice that "Teach Yourself Thai" often refers to chapter numbers, but does not print them on every page, making it so slow to follow references that they're unusable. (Alternatively sections within the chapters could be identified with full numbering.)

English by native speaker

This is not very important for comprehension, but I'm surprised publishers don't insist on it because the inevitable errors which occur make such a negative impression on the potential buyer. "Basic Thai" has many irritating errors such as "Her school is close-bye" (p102).

Thai by native speaker

This gives you some extra assurance that the Thai is up-to-date and colloquial. It also may reflect different emphases within the language.

How to write Thai characters

Several books show the printed form of the characters without hints on how to write them.

How to write Thai numbers

Some books do not show Thai numbers at all. It's worth mentioning that prices written in Thai numbers are often cheaper!

How to pronounce Thai letter names (gor gai and vowels)

Some books do not give the letter names. I don't know of *any* book which gives the vowel names.

Thai dictionary order

Thai dictionary order is extremely complex and I still have not found an adequate explanation, although "Fundamentals..." takes a reasonable shot. Surely every dictionary should include one. The situation cries out for a software solution.

Multiple fonts

Almost all books ignore the fact that Thai uses many fonts in addition to the standard one that learners are taught.

Signs (eg bathrooms)

Many people might assume that bathrooms have the international symbols and have a large problem when they look at Thai doors. Also, some of the vocabulary (eg "hahm") is specialized.

Grammar eg reported speech, conditionals, "hai"

Thai does not have a lot of the grammar that learners of European languages have to endure, but it does have grammar points which could be addressed; "Basic Thai" and "Fundamentals of the Thai Language" are good, but not well organized. Many interesting points occur to me when I'm reading Thai phrases that I haven't seen addressed: for instance, why do Thai people say "ja" in "khun ja bpai nai"?

Effectiveness of transliteration scheme (ugly, misleading, tones, duration, "eu")

Everyone agrees that transliterations are unsatisfactory but it strikes me much could still be done. I find the scheme used in the "Lonely Planet" phrasebook to be least misleading and ugly, but I would add a few features to it: I would use "bh", "bp" and "ph" to positively distinguish between the sounds and for consistency. Also, I would make sure that the duration of the vowels was always explicit.

Additionally some schemes ignore the difference between the vowel in "bpert" and the sound in "neung".

Pronunciation guide

In most books this only takes up a couple of pages. I think it deserves twenty pages or more, with a lot of integration with the audio tape, and some discussion of phonemes, dentals, plosives etc.

References to Eng/American pronunciation and vocabulary differences

This is vital for many vowels and consonants. I have certainly seen comments from Americans that they intensely disliked transliteration schemes intended for English-speaking learners which used the "er" vowel.

I have lived half my life in England and half in America, so I am conscious of many differences, but even I have occasionally been confused. Certainly it should be addressed with respect to at least the following: date formats, times, ground floor, metric/imperial measurements, imperial measurements which are not the same quantity eg "gallon", names of clothing items like "vest"

Suggestions on learning system (when to study, revise etc)

This seems critical to me. Are we really supposed to just read through the book and do all the exercises in order? How should we make sure we do not forget vocabulary when we move on to the next lesson? If we do an exercise and get 2 out of 10, what should we do?

Help on Thais using English

Most beginners will never progress beyond the level of Thai corresponding to the average bargirl's level of English, so some easy-to-follow guidelines on working with someone with heavily Thai-accented English would have a good payoff.

Guide to "standard" transliteration (eg "Don Muang")

We often have to deal with street names etc that are not in an explicit transliteration scheme. A word like "dtai" (south) may be transliterated as "tai" which seems like it means "Thai". "Sukhumvit" is pronounced with a "w".

Recently revised (eg computer, email, cable, cellphone)

As well as vocabulary issues, the whole thrust of the book may need to be updated. In particular, Thai usage of personal pronouns seems to have shifted a great deal over the forty years since "Fundamentals..." was written.

Slang terms

In many other countries slang can be left to a separate volume, but I think Thailand is a special case: terms like "khang kheun" are important to most visitors. Also, visitors tend to be in the company of demimondaines.

Includes audio tape or CD

This is essential for confidence with pronunciation. In theory, a book might be written which referred to the audio tape produced for a *different* book. I suppose the main problem is that the book is produced first and the audio tape is an afterthought, so the integration is inadequate. I think a workaround would be to supply a booklet with the audio tape with the scripts of all the material, timings etc.

Audio (if present) well-designed and technically good quality

The audio tapes I have heard seem to me to be poorly designed in many ways. Beginners need far more instruction in the individual sounds and how to produce them before ever getting started on sentences. Also, it seems utterly unrealistic to expect beginners to make out individual words in connected Thai speech and then create a response in the couple of seconds allowed in most tapes. Both the original sentence and the learner's response should be provided in the text in transliterated form.

Clearly the facilities available on a computer would be very helpful, but I don't know software which is really set up to provide language-lab-like features such as easy repetition of the current phrase or challenge and response, using standard audio-formatted material. I could imagine a portable unit like an MP3 player which would be extremely useful, but it would need very high-quality switches to withstand the constant interaction, and they would need to be comfortable and positive as well as sturdy.

The technical quality of the tapes should be high. Muffled, distorted or hiss-laden tracks turn the daunting task of learning Thai into a punishing one. These days it should not be hard to provide a CD with 70 dB S/N and clearly-assigned stereo imaging.

How to use your computer with Thai

These days most learners will have a computer and will want to install Thai fonts, view Thai websites and send email to Thai people – even if you have to send email in English you will probably want your correspondent's address to appear in incomprehensible Thai characters rather than incomprehensible alt-codes. There should be instructions for this, possibly including Thai fonts on disk for those with older systems.

Integration with a Thai teacher

In many cases the farang would be happy to pay for a personal Thai teacher, but typically the Thai person's English is inadequate to use English-language materials. I have never seen a book which provided the explanatory text in Thai as well as English but I would think it would have a market.

Likewise, I understand Buddhist temples outside Thailand often provide instruction in Thai. They probably use texts created using the utterly abysmal Thai standards. Any farang would welcome the option of a more lavishly-produced text, even at ten times the price.

Copyright issues

This is not obvious to the casual reader, but I get the impression a large part of the reason for the low standard of Thai-language instructional materials is the utter lack of copyright enforcement. Especially in dictionaries, many texts seem to have been created by the most blatant theft of work from previous texts.

The situation for texts intended for Western learners is probably not as bad but it may well be a brake on the development of high-investment products where unauthorized duplication would be all too easy.

The problem may be particularly acute for the audio tapes, which tend to be marketed at a higher price than the written text but can be duplicated more cheaply.

3. Reviews of products

I want to say in advance that it is much easier to criticize than to create: "a fool can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer".

Some of these items may be out of print or unavailable in your country.

FTL	Fundamentals of the Thai Language (5th edition)	1968	Stuart Campbell	Paragon Book Gallery
TFB	Thai for Beginners	1995	Benjawan Boomsan Becker	Paiboon Publishing
TIL	Thai for Intermediate Learners	1998	Benjawan Boomsan Becker	Paiboon Publishing
BT	Basic Thai	1996	Dr Sandro Giovanoli	Editions Duang Kamol
TYT	Teach Yourself Thai	1995	David Smyth	Teach Yourself Books
MOT	Making Out in Thai	1994	John Clewley	Tuttle Publishing
TPBD	Thai Phrase Book and Dictionary	1994	Rachel Harrison	Berlitz Publishing
TP	Thai Phrasebook	1999	Joe Cummings	Lonely Planet
TDP	Thai Dictionary Phrasebook	1999	David Smyth	Rough Guides Ltd
CT7D	Conversational Thai in 7 Days	1992	David Smyth	Passport Books
TFL	Thai for Lovers	1999	Nit & Jack Ajee	Paiboon Publishing

Name	Index	E-T	Thai-tr	T-E	Layout	TL	Audio	Other
FTL	N	Y	N	Y	Y	N	N	1,2
TFB	N	N	N	N	N	Y	Y	3,4
TIL	N	N	N	N	N	Y	Y	5
BT	N	N	N	N	N	N	N	15
TYT	N	N	Y	N	Y	N	Y	12
MOT	N	N	N	N	Y	N	N	13
TPBD	N	Y	N	N	Y	N	Y	14
TP	Y	Y	Y	N	Y	Y	N	6,7
TDP	N	Y	Y	N	Y	Y	N	15
CT7D	N	N	Y	N	Y	Y	Y	9,10
TFL	N	N	N	N	N	Y	Y	8
IFT	N	N	N	N	Y	N	Y	11

Notes

1. The transliteration does not express tones, in addition to being ugly

2. Grammar explanations are outstanding.

3. Particularly suffers from poor layout; gives a cheap and old-fashioned impression

4. Although the vocabulary choices seem whimsical, it is interesting to see the view of a Thai person on the Thai language, and the English is well edited.

5. This is the companion volume to "Thai for Beginners"

6. The Lonely Planet phrasebook is probably the best-value single volume. Flaws include the absence of a companion audio tape and the presence of many useful sidebars in the text in ludicrous locations (eg "Temple Architecture" inside the "Telecommunications" section) which are in the index but not the list of contents.

7. The LP guide is the only one which includes material for hill-tribe languages – befitting LP's backpacker emphasis.

8. Thai for Lovers has particularly well-chosen example phrases which are both useful and illuminating. I think I would prefer a general-language book from them to the ones from Becker.

9. A tape is available for this but I have not heard it.

10. With many color illustrations this is the most appealing of all the books. The "7 days" aspect seems pointless, except in suggesting to the hapless mark that he could absorb the material in a week (a big fib).

11. "In-Flight Thai" differs from other products in being primarily a CD with attached booklet. Since all the text is on the CD, the absence of tone marks in the text is forgiveable, but the transliteration system is particularly bad.

12. Of currently-available books this may be the most comprehensive. I wish the transliteration were less ugly.

13. Boasts of not representing tones in its transliteration: "We are not going to force these on you". I strongly suspect some huge production problem at the last minute. Even with a fair amount of experience, I cannot figure out what many of the words in these (seemingly well-chosen) phrases might be. The transliteration is generally puzzling: why is "traffic" shown as "rot tid"?

14. The Berlitz guide is not bad but is overshadowed by the Lonely Planet version. The text is probably too small for people over 50. It has the nice feature of sidebars intended for Thai people to point to.

15. The "Rough Guide" "Dictionary Phrasebook" has some interesting features. It's mainly a dictionary, but has many useful discussions within the dictionary, and numerous extra sections in appendices such as Thai words (in Thai script) used in notices; grammar; and food.

16. "Basic Thai" seems to have no positive points in my table, but at least emphasizes grammar, with a particularly good discussion of the uses of "hai". Really it should be edited (eg blank page 24), preferably by an English-speaking person (to remove references to the original version for Germans, eg "Gefuehle, Stimmungen" (p225), and reset using a typeface which allows diacritics (the one they used sometimes represents an apostrophe as a u-circumflex (p119)!)

2003 Oct 16 [ Thu ]

Interesting article on tonal languages

This article seems to be mostly a bunch of long words, but it does at least seem to address my concerns about *practical* knowledge about tones.

www.ling.sinica.edu.tw [http://www.ling.sinica.edu.tw/publish/LL4.1-05-Myers.pdf]

It should at least be useful for finding good search terms.

2003 Oct 10 [ Fri ]

A practical theory for training people to reproduce Thai tones

I have read a *lot* of books which purport to teach you how to speak Thai. (People who are not interested in Asian languages are definitely encouraged to skip the rest of this article!)

Their advice on tones – whatever the merits of their other information – has been almost completely useless. Thai people seem to understand me when I speak Thai, and often complement me on speaking clearly compared to other farangs, but as has been remarked on many times Thais love to be able to express a compliment. I think a more sober evaluation of my skills, and indeed the usefulness of the texts I've used, would have to explain these points:

1. I cannot reliably hear the tone of a new word. (That is, I have the feeling that I *can* recognize words which differ only in their tones, but I seem to be doing it by pattern-matching the *total sound* of the word, not by perceiving the tone as a separable entity.)

2. Thai people *themselves* have difficulty telling you the tone of a word. Obviously they can utter the word in a recognizable fashion, yet they do not know what the tone is even as they say it. (Actually, now I come to think of it, I *don't* have a good explanation of this. I guess it at least means that Thais themselves do not understand what tones are.)

3. Furthermore, if any Thai can tell a farang how to *produce* a Thai tone, I have yet to hear of it. They will charmingly and creatively encourage you to mimic them, but they have no practical advice about *what to do* to mimic them whatsoever.

4. Perhaps worse, linguistics/phonology *itself* is unable to offer any more assistance than this. Even the matter of what tones *are* seems vaguely defined. I have done Google searches several times, and never found anything practical, although the following seem more insightful than most:

"When Tones are Sung" (re Mandarin): www.rci.rutgers.edu [http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~lianhee/WC2000.doc]

"What can tone studies tell us about intonation" (also re Mandarin) home.uchicago.edu [http://home.uchicago.edu/~xuyi/Xu_ESCA97.pdf]

I happen to feel that a theory of tones which cannot train you to both produce and detect them is fundamentally deficient.

I am therefore going to outline my own theory on tones, at least in Thai. As I have conceded above, I am highly dissatisfied with my own capabilities on tones. The following theory is therefore highly likely to be wrong. On the other hand, I would like any *competition* to this theory to be at least as specific and verifiable.

My theory can be summed up in the following paragraph:

Tonality is created by the position, and changes in the position, of the jaw. These variations create variations in the sound which is created which are essentially more analogous to the diphthong concept than to pitch: Thai people can hear tonality just as we can hear the difference between "cot" and "caught" (British English) or "pod" and "pawed" (US English). The jaw variations do indeed normally create pitch variations, but these are tangential, as can be demonstrated by the fact that Thai is still understandable when sung (although I imagine it becomes less clear). The variations in resulting "sound" are more analogous to diphthongs than to pitch.

So what are these jaw positions? That's easy: higher tones are created by holding the jaw up and to the rear, lower tones are created by jutting the jaw out and lower. (I'm speaking of "higher" and "lower" with reference to the standard *descriptions* of the tones, not necessarily to pitch. It's definitely possible to vary the *pitch* of a vowel while holding the jaw stationary – try it!)

The "falling" and "rising" tones are thus produced by shifting the position of the jaw correspondingly during the production of the vowel. To my ear, the Thai falling tone is best understood as a movement from the high tone to a middle tone, and the rising tone as moving from the low tone to the middle tone, but this seems to be a matter of taste judging by the teach-yourself books. Additionally, the high tone seems to me to be not a fixed tone but a move from mid to high in many cases, but it may be that both options are heard as the same phonemic tone.

Another significant concept for the beginning learner of Thai is to avoid allowing the tone to drift downwards at the end of a vowel. In English, statements, and words in isolation, are pronounced with a falling tone which is so ingrained that we apply it automatically in uttering Thai. Many books point this out in advice to those *speaking* Thai, but in my own case I certainly had this feature so "hardwired" that I perceived *steady midtones* as *rising* simply because they did not *fall* as I was expecting.

Likewise, the element of *stress* in English routinely combines pitch and emphasis. In other words, if we stress a word in a sentence, we pronounce the word both louder and higher in pitch. Again, this seems to be hardwired in my *perception* of both these entities: it is very hard for my low-level perceptual system to pick out both entities in isolation. Ie, if one syllable is higher in pitch, and another is louder, I perceive both syllables as having "faulty stress", but am unable to distinguish a difference between them.

The issue of duration is seemingly more straightforward, but becomes more complex when we consider singing (just as with tones). The requirements of the melody force duration changes, just as they force pitch changes. Yet the sense of the words is not affected. As yet I do *not* have a theory for this. It may well be, for instance, that Thais perceive a lengthening of the syllable *with respect to the length of the syllable expected from the melody* as the duration element. (Clearly, a Thai *already* needs to "synchronize" with the standard duration of an utterance before he can correctly parse it even when a melody is not involved – and as many authorities assert, duration is even more vital in parsing the sense of an utterance than tone is.)

How do Thais *recognize* the tones? That is *very much more difficult* to train. How would you describe the difference between (British English) "pot" and "port" (other than the duration)? It seems to me you need to go through a long period of "babbling" – you vary the way *you* produce the syllables and your ear has to associate the subtle variations in "timbre" with the state of the jaw. I have to concede this as a weakness of my theory – on the other hand it's no worse than anyone else's concept.

I believe that based on the theory of tones I state above, I can teach any English speaker to create Thai tones, at least reproducibly if not (to the Thai ear) correctly. If someone else comes up with another idea, I would like it to be usable for *at least that*.

2003 Oct 09 [ Thu ]

Sound file of Thai National Anthem "Chat Thai" now available

A few days ago I was arguing with someone about how Thais form tones and said I'd heard one Thai girl I know sing the national anthem "Chat Thai" with the word "chat" sung with short duration – it's normally long. To demonstrate my point I then prevailed upon her to record "Chat Thai" for me, and I've now uploaded it here (mp3 about 800 kB, 128 kb/s mono):

www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/sounds/Asia/Thailand/Noy-ChatThai3-01.mp3]

(For some reason the webserver is telling my browser to save it with the extension "mpga"; anyone hwo knows why is invited to tell me.)

She was very embarrassed about her singing voice, although I don't think it's too bad.

The main point is that she has now repeatedly sung the final instance of "chat" (not the previous instances) with what seems to me absolutely definitely short duration, at any rate much shorter than the other instances. (I didn't tell her that the point was at issue for me, although I did ask her about it.)

I notice also that she repeatedly had difficulty articulating the transition between "sangop" and "dtae". I asked her about it and she seemed to consider it unimportant. On this rendition she was reading from the Thai text, but she made the same stumble when singing from memory. I haven't asked any other Thais for comparison yet.

I guess my argument from this instance is that Thais are allowed to modify duration when they sing a song.

It seems to me that some of the tones in this rendition are also strange, but as I make no strong claims to being able to identify tones I'll leave that issue aside for now.

2003 Sep 24 [ Wed ]

The Bua Luang "Thai Phrase Handbook" -- An overview

The "Thai Phrase Handbook" has many good qualities and I would receommend it to anybody. However, it is riddled with errors.

These fall into various types:

1. Bad layout – the heading styles are jumbled, and with no attention to whitespace etc it is hard to see where you are. In particular, p97 is probably the most significant section break in the book, but it is completely masked, appearing to be at the same level as the inconsequential sidebar on Songkran facing it.

2. Layout errors – eg p4 (index) lists the section "Words about Words" on page 263, but between pages 106 and 109. (I don't think it should be on page 263 either). Likewise "Thai Food" on p291.

3. Inconsistent/and/or incorrect tone markings in the transliterated text. The same word is even shown with two tones on the same page, eg "brothel" (338).

4. English that is either bad (probably Thai-written) or just incomprehensible, eg "The baht bears both Arabic and Thai numeral" (sic); this should read "Thai banknotes show the denominations both in Thai and Arabic numbers. Some coins are also marked both ways, although you have to look closely for the Arabic numbers." Likewise "don't listen to the tyrant..." on 335.

5. Peculiar sections which arguably are harder to understand than what they're trying to explain, eg p50 shows English words phoneticized using their transliteration system intended for Thai. I think they're trying to help you understand the transliteration system, but... Similarly the test on p197.

6. In some cases the opportunity is missed to illuminate the construction of the phrases given. For instance, all the examples for the passive voice use "unpleasant" situations, and I think Smyth remarks in his grammar that the Thais largely reserve the passive for such situations, but this is not mentioned.

7. Somewhat outdated or surprising advice. Eg, I live in Pattaya, and the advice on songthaews is rather strange. Also, I think the writer should make the point that while Thais expect each other to follow all the courtesies, an area like Pattaya has a lot of Thais who are very well aware that farangs mean no harm (so don't get lulled into false confidence).

2003 Sep 15 [ Mon ]

How do you create a phrasebook using the phonetic alphabet?

I had been feeling vaguely superior to the people who write phrasebooks for Thai and Cambodian because their transliteration schemes are so lame. Then it occurred to me that I did not actually know of a Truetype font which includes the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols. The symbol for "ng" is often useful even if the rest of the characters are eschewed.

I tried searching on Google for – "international phonetic alphabet" truetype – but for some reason it showed no hits. I found the following page anyway: nwalsh.com [http://nwalsh.com/comp.fonts/FAQ/cf_11.htm] and it gives a reference to a free phonetic font. The page includes all my search terms – go figure.

This is part of the Usenet font faq: nwalsh.com [http://nwalsh.com/comp.fonts/FAQ/index.html]

(It may have had something to do with my keyboard being set to use the quote character as the start of an extended character string. Possibly the searchterm box was holding invisible junk characters.)

Here is another link to an IPA font: ftp://ftp.io.com/pub/usr/hmiller/fonts/thripn__.ttf

This font includes all Western European characters, including the IPA, plus some Eastern European characters: ftp://ftp.io.com/pub/usr/hmiller/fonts/Thryomanes11.zip

I ran across this interesting page which includes several unique fonts, including a phonetic alphabet used in English schools, and a font which displays the hex code of the character! Not very relevant to the IPA but if you are interested in the IPA you will probably like this page. www.thesauruslex.com [http://www.thesauruslex.com/typo/engfont.htm]

Another IPA font: www.chass.utoronto.ca [http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~rogers/fonts.html]

Btw, all these links seem quite old – "available on Macontosh 800k disks only" indeed!

2003 Jul 04 [ Fri ]

From soc.culture.thai Sun Feb 9 14:40:54 2003 Path: reader1.panix.com!panix!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!nycmny1-snh1.gtei.net!\ nycmny1-snf1.gtei.net!news.gtei.net!colt.net!peernews3.colt.net!\ newsfeed.stueberl.de!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!213.122.239.226!not-for-mail From: HaaRoy Newsgroups: soc.culture.thai Subject: Learn Thai Date: Thu, 06 Feb 2003 19:08:31 +0000 Organization: HaaRoy Lines: 113 Message-ID: <3lc54v8ilvpiuul3p7g2gm8qsr7qj4garu@4ax.com> Reply-To: HaaRoy@hotmail.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 213.122.239.226 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: fu-berlin.de 1044558501 41651519 213.122.239.226 (16 [100100]) X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 1.92/32.572 X-No-Archive: yes Xref: panix soc.culture.thai:359651

HOW TO...: Learn to speak, read & write Thai

Published on Feb 7, 2003

The choice for expatriates wanting to learn Thai is enormous with dozens of schools offering various courses. Here are some of courses available in Bangkok and upcountry.

The Canadian-based International Languages Abroad (info@languagesabroad.com) runs a Thai-language programme at its school in Chiang Mai. The school has an informal atmosphere and the classes are small. It caters for all levels, with flexible starting dates. The standard course offers two lessons daily (10 lessons per week) with a maximum of 12 students per class.

Students first take a placement test to determine the language levels and ensure placement in the correct class.

The courses consist of beginning and intermediate levels and is recommended for those with a serious interest in learning to understand, speak, read and write Thai properly. In class, students practice by speaking in a controlled setting and are expected to actively participate in class interaction.

The intermediate course concentrates on sustaining conversations in various social situations, and then continues on to more complex patterns of the language. Immediate students are also introduced to basic reading and writing.

Courses range from two to four weeks, but can be extended on a weekly basis if required. They are not cheap either. A two-week course costs $950 (Bt40,531) and a four-week course $1,600 with $400 for each additional week.

The American University Alumni Language Centre (AUA) at 179, Rajadamri Road uses the ALG system: teaching Thai by creating real-life situations and experiences for students.

Students at AUA (info@-auathai.com) must be able to carry on a conversation in Thai before they are accepted into the course. Reading and Writing courses are also available. Courses are designed to meet the individual needs of students. Before registering, students are encouraged to sit in on one of the classes so that they have an understanding of the programme. Students can register for any number of hours at a single time and may purchase more hours as they progress.

Chulalongkorn University's Sasin Graduate Institute of Business Administration has an excellent (albeit pricey) four-week, intensive Thai language and culture course called Perspectives on Thailand. Classes meet all day, six days a week, for a month. Studies include language, culture, history and politics.

The Union Language School offers intensive multi-level courses in small class sizes with four weeks (80 hours) of instruction. It has a relatively early introduction to writing.

The school is part of the Christian Church of Thailand so you may get to study alongside Protestant missionaries. Private tutorials can also be arranged. It is located at the CCT Building at 109, Surawong Road. Tel (02) 252 8170

PRO Language (prolanguage@-prolanguage.co.th) courses cover a variety of topics for personal and business use of Thai. Programmes covers conversation, reading, and writing, and includes a Pratom 6 preparation course. Topics are varied and include small talk and basic yes/no questions, "polite" requests at restaurants, telephone talk, asking directions, slang and idioms, business-speak, cooking, newspaper reading and even how to communicate in Thai on the golf course. The school is at Times Square Building, Sukhumvit Road.

Thammasat University's Department of Thai, Faculty of Liberal Arts has a basic Thai course for foreigners. The 48-hour course covers speaking, reading and writing. The university also offers an intensive Thai language and culture course.

If you want to combine a Thai language course with a holiday, Krabi Language School, (075) 630 605 and (09) 873 4310, in the south has Thai conversation, reading and writing courses. There are two programmes: short courses for tourists and longer courses for foreigners who have decided to live and work in Thailand.

Lessons are held in small groups - individual tutorials can also be arranged - and can be tailored to meet individual requirements. They last one month, with two-hour lessons per day, five days a week. Lessons cover the tone system and transliteration, useful vocabulary and phrases and effective communication. Reading and writing courses are also available.

For Thai language lessons on the fly you can try Go Without Borders (www.gowithoutborders.com/contactus.htm). This tourist/language operator offers Thai language instruction through field trips and the classroom. Students venture out to the markets, street vendors, bus stops, and other places to practice and enhance the Thai language skills learnt in the classroom.

Go Without Borders also offers intensive courses based on individual schedules and needs. Its five-day Survival Thai course takes small groups (between three to eight people) to villages to study and interact with the locals.

Phil MacDonald

The Nation

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