Last winter, while scrolling endlessly through OTT platforms, I finally found a show with a synopsis that caught my eye. The only catch? It was in Thai. To be honest, during the first few minutes, I debated giving up on the show simply because of how harsh, for lack of a better term, it sounded to my untrained ears. Luckily, the story sucked me in, and the more Thai I heard, the less discordant it sounded. Since I had little knowledge of Thai before that, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Thai was a tonal language like Mandarin. Being a speaker of one tonal language, I was excited at the prospect of learning a language with a different tonal system, and that’s why I started learning Thai.
I just want to preface this by saying that I’ve mostly been using paid resources, so if you’re looking to learn Thai for free, this post probably won’t be too helpful. Anyhow, I decided to start with the Thai alphabet because I wanted to be able to read Thai as quickly as possible and dislike having to rely on romanization. The first resource I purchased was a digital file of traceable letters, but I quickly determined that it wasn’t for me and switched to ThaiPod 101’s Thai Alphabet Made Easy course. Most of the course is on YouTube for free and the rest is available as part of their paid catalog. I bought a month of their basic membership for the lesson notes and the remaining letters and finished the entire course in a little over a month. The course is chock full of information and the instructor is great and explains things very clearly. To be honest, I did not have all the letters down pat by the end of the course, which was mostly due to my lack of revision, and the tone rules went completely over my head.
During the eternal search for learning resources, I came across a review of BananaThai’s Intensive Thai program. Intrigued, I looked into BananaThai’s program offerings and then decided to purchase the Ultimate Thai Bundle, which includes five self-paced online courses: the Ultimate Guide to Thai Reading, the Intensive Thai Course, Read Thai Exercise 1, Read Thai Exercise 2, and Thai Dialogue Listening Practice 1. I’ve completed the first four courses and plan on doing the listening course after a little break.
I decided to start with the Ultimate Guide to Thai Reading because I felt that my knowledge of the Thai alphabet was shaky at best. This course includes a downloadable pdf textbook, six chapters of video lessons, and access to the course’s quizlet flashcards. The first chapter covers the Thai consonants, organized by consonant class (middle, low, and high), with some vowels sprinkled in. In my opinion, this is the optimal way for second language learners to learn the Thai alphabet since each consonant class has its own tone rules. The following chapter introduces ending consonant sounds as well as the concept of live and dead endings, which also have to do with the tone of a syllable. While the fact that the same consonant is pronounced differently depending on whether it is at the beginning or end of a syllable may seem slightly daunting, there are only eight ending consonant sounds, so they aren’t too hard to remember. In the next chapter, Kru Smuk (the instructor and founder of Banana Thai) teaches the Thai vowels, which are a whole other beast. Not only does Thai have short and long vowels (a concept that should be familiar to English speakers), but it also has vowels that can change shape, move around, or even disappear! Luckily, Kru Smuk goes into detail regarding the vowels and teaches you how to determine where a syllable starts and ends, which can be confusing as there are no spaces between words in Thai. Chapter four introduces the long-awaited or highly dreaded tone rules. I highly recommend training your ear to “hear” the different tones before you start learning the tone rules, otherwise, the whole thing is kind of moot. Additionally, I really like the tone maps that Kru Smuk made and referenced them often while trying to memorize the many tone rules. The final two chapters cover additional rules and marks in Thai. Each chapter comes with practice exercises and a short online quiz. Once you finish the entire course, you can take the final quiz and get a digital certificate of completion if you are into that kind of thing. I most certainly am. One more thing, since my goal going into this course was to master the Thai alphabet, I chose to focus on learning the Thai script and didn’t make any effort to memorize the example words or sentences. I’d suggest doing the same if you feel like you’re suffering from information overload. To conclude, if your goal is to learn how to read and write the Thai script, I highly recommend this course!
After completing the Ultimate Guide to Thai Reading, I started Read Thai Exercise 1 because I wanted to drill the pronunciation and tone rules. However, I found myself struggling quite a bit since I had zero knowledge of basic Thai grammar and sentence structure. Therefore, I switched to the Intensive Thai Course. This course includes a textbook, exercise book, solution book, ten chapters of video lessons, and access to the course’s quizlet flashcards. Each chapter of the video lessons is structured as follows: vocabulary, grammar, dialogues, an audio bonus, and then a quiz. The comments section below the videos is also a treasure trove of information. Kru Smuk provides very detailed answers to students’ questions, so don’t forget to scroll down to the comments. The topics covered are what you would expect from your typical introductory language course, for instance, introducing yourself, describing actions, ordering food, numbers and telling time, describing location et cetera. What I’d do was underline each syllable and mark the tones of all the words beforehand, and then I’d watch the vocabulary video and check if I had marked the syllables and tone correctly. I picked up this habit from Kru Smuk, and while this may seem cumbersome and excessive at first, it really does help drill those pronunciation and tone rules. After completing each chapter, I’d review the material before doing the exercises in the exercise book. One of my favorite parts of this course is the quizlet flashcards. There are multiple sets of flashcards for each chapter, all with audio, making them very convenient for review. All in all, I think that this is a fun and engaging course that teaches you the basics of the Thai language and is well worth the price. The only thing I wasn’t too wild about was that some of the example sentences and grammar points were written using romanization rather than the Thai script. I would not say that this is a deal breaker, but it did mean that I had to spend extra time using google translate and a Thai-English dictionary to write those sentences out using the Thai alphabet.
Upon finishing the Intensive Thai course, I moved on to Read Thai Exercise 1 followed by Read Thai Exercise 2. Each book contains ten short stories about Khun Michael, a foreigner working in Bangkok, and his friends and colleagues. The e-books are structured as follows: the short story, vocab, grammar, and comprehension exercises. In the reading guide videos, Kru Smuk goes over how to pronounce each word correctly, the meaning of the story, and the grammar points used. Downloadable audio files of the vocab and story are also included. Additionally, each story comes with a “speed up your reading” video which is basically the audio files with on-screen text that you can use to practice speed reading or shadowing by adjusting the speed of the video. Having just completed the Intensive Thai course, I went into this course thinking that most of it, at least for the first book, would be review. So I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that a good portion of the vocabulary was new to me. And a great thing about the way these stories are structured is that some of the words are repeatedly used in different stories, meaning that it’s next to impossible to not remember those words by the time you’re finished with the course. For this series, I would first go over the vocab list and mark the tones as well as look up the individual elements or words within compound words before attempting to read the story on my own to see how much I understood. Then, I’d watch the reading guide, review the vocab and grammar used in the story, and then do the practice exercises. Next, I’d practice reading along to the story three times using the “speed up your reading” video. On the whole, I think that this is a great course for beginners looking to improve their Thai reading skills.
Since BananaThai has been my main learning resource for the past year, this post has become a BananaThai review of sorts. While there are certainly cheaper and perhaps faster ways to learn Thai, I’m satisfied with my choice of resources so far as they’ve provided me with structure and taken out most of the guesswork. I’m not sure whether this post will be helpful to those of you looking to learn Thai, but I do wish you the best on your Thai learning journey!
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