Customer Reviews

Thai for Advanced Readers

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This is a very tough course. I finished "Thai For Beginners" and "Thai For Intermediate Learners" and I still had trouble with this course.
The book has vocabulary and stories / essays which uses the vocabulary. The Cd's, though, only have the stories / essays on them. That makes it difficult to insure you are pronouncing the words correctly. If you make it to this book, you should know how to read Thai. That will help you with decipher what tone the vocabulary should be and how to sound out the words. But, being a non-native speaker, I'm sure I'm still not saying the words like a native Thai speaker would.
This book makes a large jump from "Thai for Intermediate Learners." I think Mrs. Benjawan Poomsan Becker should write another book to bridge the gap.
This is a good course for anyone who wants to learn more about Thailand, Thai people and their customs... And for those who would like to improve their Thai reading skills.

*Thai for Advanced Readers* is a fairly good reader for lower-level intermediate students. It's got to be kept in mind that, for less frequently studied languages, "advanced" is used to describe non-native speakers whose abilities would still be considered fairly primitive in the major Western languages. This book could be a good stepping stone, but to what? There's still a vast amount of knowledge necessary before a person who had worked thru Becker's books could read a newspaper or short stories, but there don't seem to be any real materials for instruction in those skills. I don't know of any book, yet, that merits this volume's title.

Thai for Advanced Readers is a huge jump in difficulty from the Intermediate book in this series. This book consists of several one to three page passages in Thai, followed by vocabulary relevant to the passage, and finally the translation in English.

This book offers a lot to learn to anyone willing to put in the time. Personally speaking, about halfway through this book I noticed a jump in my reading speed and in my ability to "sight-read" words that I had never seen before.

The book has a few drawbacks however. First, as I mentioned before, there is a huge jump in difficulty. If you read the beginner and intermediate books and are expecting the next step in the progression, forget it. This book should probably fall in a series of books oriented towards reading skills.

The second issue I have with this book is overall effectiveness of it as a study resource. As much as I enjoyed the challenge of this book, I can't say the vocabulary stuck with me at all, nor did it do anything to improve my day to day Thai skills. Perhaps this is more fault of the student than the book but I thought it was fair to share my experience.

Worked through most of this book some time ago, and it is a great book. It is fun to read, and gives a good insight to Thai culture and history also. I believe some people might find a thai vocabulary in the back of the book useful.