Colloquial Thai: The Complete Course for Beginners

by John Moore, Saowalak Rodchue

Specially written by experienced teachers for self-study or class use, Colloquial Thai provides a step-by-step approach to written and spoken Thai. No prior knowledge of the language is required. The best choice in personal language learning, key features * a wide range of interactive exercises for regular practice
* clear, concise grammar notes
* a useful vocabulary and pronunciation guide
* an answer key and reference section. An easy to follow and rewarding course, Colloquial Thai enables those who follow it to communicate confidently and effectively in Thai in a broad range of everyday situations. Helping to develop listening and pronunciation skills, 120 minutes of audio material recorded by native speakers are also available to accompany the text on both cassettes and CDs.

Genres: Language

332 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 1994

About the author

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Reviews

[Ferenc · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is by far my favourite book on beginner's Thai, so far I have used this book and Becker's and Smyth's two books. For me Moore and Rodchue's book has been the most effective and fun to work with.

The strengths of this book are its cover of grammar and its very large number of exercises: the grammar is explained in a simple way and the exercises are comprehensive. It has a much larger set of exercises than Smyth's TY book, and Becker's book don't even have grammar exercises. So if you aim to master spoken Thai and Thai grammar this book is an obvious choice. In addition, it has more listening passages than both of the other books.

My only critique of the book is that it does not teach you the script in detail, not enough if you plan to become a fluent reader.
Other reviewers have criticized the fact that the tones for new word are only shown when the words are first mentioned, at subsequent mention they have no tone marks. I had no problems at all with this because you should have memorized the words anyway.

Side-note:
Moore's 'Colloquial Thai' and Becker's 'Thai for Beginner's' complement eachother perfectly: Becker has no grammar exercises at all but Moore has an abundance of them, Moore does not cover the script in much detail but Becker does it comprehensively. So for the dedicated learner I recommend using both books, starting with Moore & Rodchue's book.

[Emilie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is great for self studying. There are distinct lessons with vocab, grammar, practice, and examples. I found it to be a helpful and consistent resources. However, there are a few major flaws.
First, the entire text is romanized. This made me so frustrated! I understand using romanization in the beginning, but I really wished the text slowly integrated actual thai characters or provided thai characters alongside romanization. Second, I was slightly frustrated with lack of consistency with vocab. It was unclear sometimes if the words were verbs or nouns (e.g. it would just say "burn"). The vocab lists would be more useful if the text specified part of speech. This notation would provide a better translation. Finally, my last frustration stemmed from the dictionary section. I often couldn't find vocab words in the dictionary section that were previously given in the vocab list or grammar notes. It affected my ability to translate from romanization into characters and to find words.
Despite my problems with romanization, vocab lists, and the dictionary, this textbook is highly effective and efficient. I would recommend this text over others for self-studying. You learn a variety of topics and have enough practice to reinforce them. You get useful vocab paired with realistic dialogues and culture points. Good textbook, just needs to ditch the romanization.