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Originally Posted by domifletch
I just try to say to my TG how much I love her ... www.learningthai.com can help. Anyway, I really want to speak and write in Thai... I think really easier to learn to write first, because tones, don't you think so ?
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No, I don't think so. Until the time comes when you can speak fluently, the tones will always be the biggest problem for a Westerner learning to speak Thai, because tones are not something we grew up with an awareness of. We do convery meaning using tones in the Western languages when we speak. However, we use tones to convey emotions and nuances of meanings. When we inject our tonality into Thai, it just screws things up, because in their language the tones change the meaning of the word itself, not just shade the emotional connotation or add nuance to the meaning.
So when learning to speak Thai, we not only have to remember the tone for a word, and speak the word with the correct intonation, but we also have to unlearn the Western use of tonality so as not to inadvertently change meanings of word when we don't intend to. This is especially true in the way we turn a statement into a question in English(I think other Euro languages, too) by finishing the sentence with a rising tone. When you do that in Thai, you not only fail to ask the question, but you often will be changing the meaning of the words at the end of the sentence by adding the rising tone inadvertently. Fortunately, "mai" is a high(technically rising) tone, so if you don't forget to use mai, then it won't be quite as bad, but could still be a problem because there is a tendency to raise the tone on one or more words before mai.
But the point is that you can't put off learning to speak tonally. It is so basic that you need to get right to it.
Writing is great. Especially for correspondence. But the best part about reading and writing is that it expands your vocabulary. Also when you read and write you can slow things down and go at your own pace. But the repetition of words, and having to constantly learn new words is the best thing about reading. It is a vocabulary builder and reinforcer. Writing is natural adjunct to reading in that you use the vocabulary you learned, and force yourself to become active rather than passive in using your creative thought processes by constructing sentences. Words are the bricks that build walls of sentences, sentences are the wall that, put together, forms thoughts, thoughts are the buildings that form neighborhoods of real multi-level communication between two or more people.
But in the end, you still have to speak it, and mastering the tones will be difficult for 90% of Westerners. It is not nearly as difficult for Asians who already speak a tonal or semitonal language. For them, Thai is avery easy language to learn, just as Spanish is an easy language for a Westerner to learn, in most cases.
So, my advice, is that the best way to learn Thai, is to read, write, and speak as much as you can, simultaneously. Learning to write really does help with the pronunciations in Thai, however, because Thai script is very phonetic, and it is a lot easier to figure out what a word sounds like by reading it in Thai than by trying to read it in the "transliterated" Roman alphabet form which is nearly hopeless, for a number of reasons, but mainly because there are sounds in Thai for which there really are no Roman letters that will suffice to denote them. Unfortunately, it is much easier to read the tones, when the word is written in Roman letters, because the tones are clearly marked. The Thai script does indicate what the correct tone is, but it is so complex that it is like it was written in a secret code to keep people from figuring it out. So you have to "decode" each word using a complex formula to figure out the correct tone. In the end, it is easier just to remember the tone. If you ask a Thai person what tone a word is, they will stop, say it to themselves a few times and try to figure it out. Except for the obvious words, they usually don't readily know what the tone is, they just know how to say and how to spell it, which is all you need to know to speak, read, and write Thai.
JayBee
