3/13/2024 0 Comments Transliteration thai to englishIn the beginning, when I tried to pronounce each tone deliberately and accurately, I found that no-one could understand me. Secondly, nearly all the transliteration schemes are fundamentally wrong! Unless you want to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet and transcribe everything into IPA (because few if any textbooks bother with it), you will probably end up learning the wrong pronunciation for about half of all the words you learn.Īnd even then, the tones are usually taught incorrectly. There is no standard and you either have to restrict your learning to books and courses that follow one of the more popular transliteration methods, or try to figure out the correct pronunciation from various ambiguous spellings used in different language schools, courses or videos. And don’t get me started on the completely wrong and arbitrary official government transliterated spellings for names of people or towns or even the word “city”. Alternative spellings might include “sawasdii khrup” or “sawad di krap”. So “Hello, how are you?” becomes “sà-wàt dee khráp (or khà) – sàbai dee mǎi khráp (or khá)”įirstly, this is one of many ways to spell Thai words phonetically, with or without the strange diacritics to denote the so-called “tones”. You might be impatient to start speaking and conversing with Thai people as quickly as possible, so you might feel that learning to read is a waste of time and it seems unbelievably complicated because of the dozens of letters (officially 59 or 72, depending how you count) and hundreds of senseless rules that you’d have to learn.Īfter all, all the beginner text books and classes use a kind of phonetic transliteration so that you can begin to speak and understand Thai straight away. Many people don’t see the need to read Thai. It turns out that tones are the easiest and least significant part of the Thai language! After doing this many times, you develop a kind of mental shorthand or dexterity and it becomes automatic and almost immediate.Īnd – a bit like learning to drive where everything seems so complicated and up in the air at first – it becomes very easy. You are expected to repeat the course, but this time adding in the tone. Once you can sound out each word accurately, then you learn how to figure out the tone for each word. There’s a lot more involved, such as how the vowels are positioned ( surrounding the consonant letter, not following each consonant in a left-to-right manner as in English), whether to fuse two letters together (as in “ prayer”) or pronounce them separately (as in “ pa riah”) and how to separate out words when they are written without spaces in-between. You can easily learn the Thai alphabet in a day, but that isn’t enough to be able to read Thai. In the Rapid Method, we separate out the letters and their sounds from the tones in a two-step process. The tones are kinda important in that you need to vary the tone where expected otherwise you the listener will be taken aback and have to ask “come again…?” But in normal (fast), colloquial speech, words are mostly all run together in a kind of monotone and only a few important words – and the ending of a phrase – needs to be sounded out with the correct tone. So what about the tones you might ask? Many words have different meanings if you pronounce them with a different tone – but we have tones in English, and it isn’t always so easy to tell what your meaning is in English if you vary the tone. The writing system is 100% phonetic (unlike English or Chinese): every letter has only one sound. The grammar is as simple as can be (unlike French or German). The reason why Thai is so easy is because it is logical and consistent (unlike English, which is probably the most inconsistent and complicated language in the world). It’s only classed as a difficult language because it is usually taught in a very complicated manner.
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