Thai Complete Course

by David Smyth

Learning Thai as easy as 1-2-3

With this book, Thai is attainable for any beginning student. You can use Teach Yourself Thai Complete Course at your own pace or as a supplement to formal courses. This complete course is based on the very latest learning methods and designed to be enjoyable and user-friendly.

Prepared by experts in the language, Teach Yourself Thai begins with the basics and gradually promotes you to a level of smooth and confident communication,

Up-to-date, graded interactive dialogues Graded units of culture notes, grammar, and exercises Step-by-step guide to pronunciation Practical vocabulary Regular and irregular verb tables Plenty of practice exercises and answers Bilingual glossary Package includes two 60-minute CDs and a book.

Genres: Language, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published June 11, 1996

Reviews

[Alien Bookreader · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a course for total beginners but is not actually structured well for total beginners. It's structured in a way that you could get practice if you already know some Thai.

My biggest issue is that it teaches you to memorize phrases without actually knowing what the individual words in the phrase mean.

For instance it has sections like this:

"To get a waiter's attention"
(Phrase in Thai)

"To ask for a glass of water"
(Phrase in Thai)

Basically you will end up memorizing phrases and knowing the purpose of the phrases without actually understanding what the words mean. That is ... very bad for language learning. It will slow you down. Language learning shouldn't be rote memorization. You'll end up memorizing a bunch of speech sounds but not actually speak the language.

Also for pragmatic reasons - do you really want to say a random phrase to "get the attention" of the waiter without knowing what you're saying to him? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

There are sections where individual words are translated, but strangely phrases and sentences are never translated word for word.

After studying 7+ languages in my life, I couldn't think of a worse strategy for learning a language. You'll have gaps in your knowledge and your learning process will be slowed down and disjointed (especially for learning the common syntactic structures in everyday speech).

This book could be useful as a supplement if you're learning basic Thai through other methods, but on it's own it's not a good learning method.

[André · Rating 4 out of 5]

For anyone who wants to learn Thai, this sure is a good start. The lessons start easy and actually don't get much more difficult, but you learn more words and more grammar as you get along. The book was a bit too simple for me, as I was already a beginner when I started reading it, but I still learned quite much. I hope there is a sequel or something... By the way, it comes with a CD, but I haven't listened to that one yet, hehe.

[Gaystructive Criticism · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book isn’t just completely useless due to the ridiculously bespoke transliteration. It will hinder you’ll progress once you’ll transition into better standardised works.

Avoid completely.