Talking Thai: Learning to Speak Thai Fluently
**Notice: This course has been put back under development. While at any given time most of it will be functional, we are in the process of making some big changes so some things may not work as intended while we are updating the materials.
Read the Introduction below and/or click on lesson one if you’d like to know what to expect in the rest of the Talking Thai course.
In my experience, one of the most frustrating parts of language learning as a beginner is finding out what native speakers are actually saying. Schools, books and even native speakers themselves are generally little or no help and have a tendency to teach you what they think you should be saying.
Once you are fairly comfortable with the sounds of a language, you’ll want to start learning common phrases and sentences which people (especially you) can and do use every day.
We do this by spending a little bit of time each day drilling a couple of sentences. The goal is to be able to pronounce them perfectly and at a quick, natural pace. Once you’ve drilled a sentence a bit, you should go out and practice them on people! You need to use those sentences with other human beings in order for them to end up in the part of your brain where they will stay a while.
The idea with this course is to show you how someone fluent would speak in a number of very common situations that you as a foreigner are likely to encounter in Thailand. I’ve added in some of the key vocab in flashcards between the lessons, but not all of it. I don’t want to overwhelm anybody with flashcards or explanations. The particles can be very confusing at first. They are sometimes very difficult to translate and I think it’s best to see them as a form of emotional coloring that takes the place of intonation in non-tonal languages. Nobody explained them to me, but I eventually developed a feel for how they worked.
How to use this course:
Don’t plow through these dialogues. I’d recommend spending an entire week on each dialogue. Give it a solid study session of 20+ minutes every other day. On the off days, just make sure to listen to it a few times, run through the flashcards, then read it once or twice and finally listen to it again.
Don’t worry about what particles/phrases/words are doing. It’s more useful to start to get used to the feeling of the sentence and how it’s used as opposed to knowing the definition of every word. When you first start listening to the dialogues, it may be very difficult to figure out what’s going on. We tend to freeze up and miss what comes after, but you can train yourself to just let things you don’t know go. Take a breath and listen again. It won’t happen in one sitting or 10, but I promise if you keep coming back to these, they will get easier.
As always, if you get stuck or feel totally lost, you can email or message me and I’ll try to get you back on track.