Debating the Bear

What are the best Thai language sources for international news?

Kikiat has a great page linking to newspaper websites from Thailand. I've been reading the international news at Naew Na (แนวหน้า), dictionary in hand, and I'm finally at the point where I can make sense out of many articles. This is a big improvement over a year ago, when I could barely read Thai at all.

News about the U.S. is by far the easiest to understand, because I'm often already familiar with the situations and events. News about Thailand and Southeast Asia is very difficult, since there's a presumed knowledge of people, places, and political parties that are less prevalent in the American media. I look forward to the day that I can easily follow news about Thailand, especially since Thai politics are so interesting at this point in history.

Today, Naew Na has a headline about George Bush "arguing with the bear" in advance of the G-8 summit. My wife had to explain that the bear refers to Russia. In hindsite, the meaning is obvious; even the U.S. media used to represent the Soviet Union by a bear. The symbol is less common in the U.S. media since the end of the Cold War, and it would be unusual for it to appear in a U.S. headline.

I wonder whether the U.S. media uses similar idioms in their headlines, but I don't notice, since I understand the meaning.

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Technorati tags: thailand, thai news, thai language

SpokenThai.Com

The site spokenthai.com has free Thai audio and video with transcripts.

Wow. Very nice.

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Technorati tags: second language acquisition, thai, thai language

Compliments

This is quite an interesting thought from Stuart Jay Raj, a polyglot who has appeared on Thai television demonstrating his remarkable abilities.

My grandfather used to tell me “When you’re learning a language, you want to try your best to avoid having speakers of that language complimenting you. If people are complimenting you on how well you’re speaking ‘their’ language, it means that you still haven’t arrived”. That’s not to say that you want them insulting you! What he meant was that, if you’re speaking a language proficiently enough to a native speaker, the thought of complimenting you won’t even cross their mind.

This is somewhat unintuitive, but it makes a lot of sense to me.

I do think that there are exceptions. For example, I love to talk about language study and acquisition. At such times, I often compliment people who speak English as a second language with native or near-native proficiency and accent.

Mr. Raj alludes to another mitigating situation in the same post. In some cases, a speaker's physical features may make it unlikely that they are a native speaker. Obviously, this does not apply to ESL students, since native English speakers have all sorts of features. However, I would suspect that a farang speaking Thai with native proficiency could still expect curiosity and a few compliments.

In any case, I think this is great food for thought.

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Technorati tags: second language acquisition, thai, thai language

Removed

I'm removing a few posts that are no longer interesting to me. You can reach the homepage here.

Thanks for your interest!

ALG Principles

I recently noticed this summary of the Automatic Language Growth (ALG) philosophy on the ALG website.

ALG Principles

1. Our point of reference is the native speaker, not other students.

2. Children are the best examples of how to learn another language.

3. The adult ability to translate, memorize, and practice can never produce as good results as naturally learning a language. Trying only makes things worse.

4. Practice cannot help, and in fact it damages one's ability to learn naturally.

5. The ability to speak comes from one's ability to understand. Therefore, understanding is what must be sought after, not practice speaking.

6. Understandable and interesting experiences are the key to learning another language.

I try to follow this approach in my own study. I do sometimes compromise to compensate for the lack of a teacher, for example, by looking up translations. But I dedicate most of my study time to comprehensible input. Once I have a certain level of comprehension, I minimize translation and memorization and try to understand directly. I've been pleasantly surprised by how well it works.

It's interesting that, although these principles are supported by research, they are not taken into account by most language programs. I wonder whether part of the inertia has to do with the practice of assigning grades based on homework and exams, which is difficult to reconcile with a natural approach.

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Technorati tags: second language acquisition

Post Removed

Update 7.23.2010: I'm removing a few posts that are no longer interesting to me. You can reach the homepage here.

Thanks for your interest!