In Thai there are no articles and you also don’t need to learn if a word is masculine or feminine like in French or Spanish. But for the sake of simplicity, I’ll deal with them separately here.There are a number of consonants and vowels that are unfamiliar to native English speakers and need to be learnt. I also heard that they were used by embassies for their language training, and that’s good enough for me. For example: – ‘’muang’’ (เมือง), meaning city, consists of the vowels eu + uh. These are the word frequencies he found. I will show you exactly what I did on a day to day base and give my best tips and tricks so that you can learn Thai more effectively!4. For me, it worked out well because I was craving the routine. – ‘’nuay’’ (เหนื่อย), meaning tired, consists of the vowels oo + ay + ee Getting these sounds right requires some practice and if don’t pronounce words accurately enough Thai people might not understand you.Like Chinese, Thai is a tonal language. This means that with a bit of time and effort spent in the right areas, you can quickly start speaking the language and enjoying the benefits!Whatever Thailand means to you and your life, you’re in for a treat!What constitutes a difficult language is not the same for a native English speaker as for a native Chinese speaker.It’s been interesting for me to learn Thai, as I’ve been able to observe similarities with various other languages I know.I’ve also found some vocabulary that seems to be in common with Arabic and Japanese – two languages unrelated to Thai.So, given my existing knowledge of Asian languages, it may be difficult for me to be completely objective on assessing the difficulty of Thai. Let’s take a look at the things that actually make Thai Most words in Thai contain only one or two syllables. Read some Thai-guru and polyglot Stu Jay Raj and me posing for a photo in his language-labTry out our VocaBooster Thai course and learn the 100 most important Thai words!This is the language school where my friend Olly studied during our trip.Glossika comes with 1000’s of sentences in Thai. In order to produce some of the sounds in Thai you need to make certain shapes with your month and position your tongue in ways you’ve probably never done before. This is the detail of "Speak Thai Easy" Speak Thai easy Co.,Ltd. However, the following books come recommended:Learning Thai, although for a short time, was a fantastic experience, and I was super happy to be able to speak with Thai people in their own language.If you have a friend learning Thai, please take a moment to share this post with them, or on social media – it would mean a lot to me! That means that the meaning of a word can change depending on the tone of a syllable. Simply fill out the box below for instant access.We use cookies to provide you the best experience on our website. Also in Thai, the 20:80 rules applies.If you already know some some basic vocabulary, memorizing these compound words becomes pretty easy.Words in Thai, also, do not change form with gender, person or even tense. This can be either a positive or negative depending on your disposition! This is not always the case with European languages like Dutch for example. This is not the case in German and Russian for example. If you want to learn how to speak Thai quickly, I would recommend not learning the alphabet at the beginning.Once you start practicing your speaking, make sure that your teacher corrects your tones and pronunciation If you’ve never learned a tonal language before, it will take some time to get your tones and pronunciation right. You can go to a language school like Olly did, but I chose to take lessons online with a Thai teacher called Jane from Going to a language school can work well too as you get to interact with other people in Thai in person.
I’ll update this list in due course once I’ve learnt to read myself!Having not studied with a textbook myself, I can’t give any personal recommendations. Is it possible to learn to speak Thai easily if you are a native English speaker?The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) has created a list to show the approximate time you need to learn different languages as an English speaker:As you can see in the image above they’ve categorised Thai as a language that has significant differences from English and is therefore not very easy to learn.Thai has a lot of vowels that can be tricky to pronounce for native English speakers. You might wonder if that’s enough to speak fluent Thai. (I give you this complete list in the free bonus accompanying this post.
Sometimes we would do what she prepared, other times not. Outside of these lessons, I tried to practice Thai language basics with taxi drivers, in restaurants and even in a few language meetups. When Dutch people hear you have an accent they often reply in English.If you have a chance to visit Thailand you will notice that you can get a lot of speaking practice if you make the effort to try and speak. What does it actually take to become conversational in Thai? You hear the most common conversational words over and over again, and that makes it easy to learn to speak Thai and become familiar with the tones.I’ve noticed many people who already speak a tonal language (like Mandarin Chinese) say: “I’m scared to learn Thai, because I’m worried it will interfere with my Chinese!”Far from being a risk, I personally found it a huge advantage to already know a tonal language – Given that learning tones is mostly a question of familiarity, already having a tonal language under my belt was a huge leg-up.Will learning Thai interfere with a tonal language you already know? Next, I’ll answer common questions about learning Thai. For me, this falls into the larger question of how to Because you can't read Thai yet as a beginner, the only way to remember the tone for each word is with a little line, often called a tone marker (check out the diagram above).It’s important to remember, however, that this visual representation is not accurate – it’s just an approximation of the true tone (which are flexible, and can adapt anyway).The true tones can actually be found embedded in the Thai script itself, which is an important reason to learn the script (we’ll discuss this later):Pronunciation is a general term that shouldn’t really be separated from tones.