Fonts

During my recent visit to Thailand, reading became more automatic as I read signs everywhere around me. One challenge with reading signs is that there are many fonts.

This logo that obviously reads "USA" actually reads "Breeze" (บรีส). It's the Thai brand for a laundry detergent called Omo in other parts of the world.



The "Wow" in this movie title is part of the transliteration of the English title "Surf's Up" (เซิร์ฟอัพ). In the official transliteration, the two "W"s are different Thai characters, but it doesn't matter from the standpoint of pronunciation. The second character in the subtitle is an M-shaped thing. My wife had to tell me that it's a ตอ เต่า.



English-looking Thai characters in logos are very common, and I'm sure they are intentionally designed in that way.

I find myself wondering whether, as a child, I had to figure out the differences between English fonts.

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Technorati tags: second language acquisition, thai, thai language

Reading and Writing Thai

People sometimes happen upon this blog searching for resources for reading Thai script. I am no expert, but I would recommend the free lessons at learningthai.com.

http://www.learningthai.com/thai_alphabet.html

The links marked "Thai Reader" are especially good.

Some books teach Thai reading and writing. The AUA books entitled Reading and Writing are the best I've seen, but they are hard to find. They also assume a small core vocabulary and familiarity with the old AUA transliteration system. The book and CD Thai for Beginners by Benjawan Poomsan Becker is a good introduction if you can't find the AUA books or don't have the prerequisites.

To learn Thai script, most people get help from a teacher or a tutor. Some colleges and universities teach Thai reading and writing, and some cities have a Thai Buddhist temple that offers instruction.

Opinions differ about whether it's best to acquire spoken Thai before learning to read and write. On one hand, a student who begins reading right away runs a risk of developing bad habits, like reading with incorrect tones or no tones at all. On the other hand, students who delay reading often substitute some kind of transliteration, which is inefficient and can lead to an undesirable dependency.

When I studied Thai at the University of Oregon, we began by focusing on basic vocabulary. During that time, we used a transliteration system which distinguished all the features of Thai phonemes, such as tone, vowel length, and plain stop consonants. Instruction in basic vocabulary went on for about 8 weeks, then we learned the Thai writing system.

Students in the ALG program at AUA in Bangkok acquire quite a large core vocabulary by pure listening, with no support from a transliteration system, then proceed to learn to read and write. This seems like the best approach, but it's hard to do if you can't attend AUA.

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Technorati tags: thai language, thai alphabet, thai script

Spelling is Hard

Now that I'm chatting occasionally on instant messenger, I realize how difficult spelling can be. Reading in Thai is very phonetic most of the time, but writing is more difficult. There are often many different choices of letter for a phoneme (like initial ศ, ษ, ศ, final พ, ฟ, ภ, บ, ป, and so on). Words borrowed from other languages can also have a silent letter at the end that's "cancelled out" (as in "คอมพิวเตอร์"). I suppose this is still much easier than English. In English, even the rules for reading are ambiguous.

Usually, my chat partner can tell what I'm trying to spell, but I need to get better at this. Here's what I'm planning. If anyone else has had to learn to spell in a new language, I'd be interested to get advice.

1. Probably the best thing I can do for my spelling is a lot of reading. Eventually, this should provide the necessary intuition for whether a word "looks" right. Unfortunately, my reading is so slow and my vocabulary is still so small that a lot of reading is going to take a lot of time. But I'd like to get faster, so this seems like a good thing to try.

2. There are certain phrases that come up all the time, like "Hello", "Did you eat rice yet?", and "What time is it in Thailand". My name comes up all the time, and the names of the people I chat with come up all the time. For these sorts of words and phrases, I can practice typing them until correct spelling becomes more automatic.

Between these two approaches, I think I'll eventually learn to spell.

Any thoughts?

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Technorati tags: second language acquisition, thai, thai language

I have been working through the AUA books entitled Reading and Writing. The Thai writing system has 44 consonants, which are divided into three classes, arbitrarily named high, mid, and low. The consonant classes are used to determine tones. One of the challenges Thai students face is to learn which consonants belong to which class. During the Thai class I took in graduate school, the writing system was de-emphasized until the second half of the course, at which point there was an intensive memorization effort aimed at the consonant classes and the corresponding rules. I did well with the homework, quizzes, and exams, but I never felt that I had mastered the material.

As usual, I find the AUA approach to be remarkably innovative, well thought-out, and interesting. Rather than jumping right into memorizing classes and tone rules, the AUA book starts by distinguishing sonorant consonants from aspirates and plain stops. Grouping consonants in this way requires no memorization -once the student understands the distinction, it is obvious which group each consonant belongs to. For example, "m" and "n" are sonorants because the larynx vibrates when they are pronounced. Further lessons explain that that sonorants are all low class and plain stops are all mid class, while explaining the tone rules for each class. This makes learning their classes and the corresponding rules very easy. The aspirates then have to be sorted into high and low class. Sorting out the aspirates is also easy, because the initial syllable of the name of each aspirate has either a rising tone (ขอ ไข่) or a mid tone (คอ ควาย). In the former case, the class is high, and in the latter case, the class is low.