Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Colloquial Thai?, February 6, 2000
This review is from: Colloquial Thai; A Complete Language Course/With Two Audio CDs (Colloquial Series) (Paperback)
Overall, I thought the book was a good text for someone just attempting to learn Thai. What becomes evident later is that it in itself is insufficient to provide a complete guide. There are numerous spelling/grammatical errors that one can find as you progress through the course. In several instances when checking answers to the exercises provided, you'll find the answers do not completely match the question. What I discovered after a period of time is that this book will give you a good reference but you need an additional text or two that combines good transliteration with a cross referenced dictionary. I found that using this book with Mike Simpson's "The English Thai Dictionary" provided me with a better understanding. I think the fault for the errors is with the author/publisher but the greatest disadvantage to the up and coming learner is that there is no standard by which Thai is taught. Every book/author takes a different approach to the romanization of the language and the Thai scripting. Still, it is a good reference book that will give you the fundamental basics and start you on the way.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Better than a phrase book..., October 25, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Colloquial Thai; A Complete Language Course/With Two Audio CDs (Colloquial Series) (Paperback)
This course is certainly better than a phrase book. I like the dialogs and that they teach you the grammar. However, they use their own way of transliterating Thai into the roman alphabet, which makes it utterly confusing when you try to look something up in a dictionary. "j" is written as "ch", "ch" is "sh", etc. Furthermore, the transliteration is skimping on the tone marks. Tone marks appear in the glossary but not in the dialoges. Although each chapter has a section where they teach you Thai script, they don't show the Thai spelling of the words that are used in the dialoges. In my opinion, "Teach yourself Thai" is a better course than this one.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
This book is ok, better for buisiness traveler than pleasure, April 30, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Colloquial Thai; A Complete Language Course/With Two Audio CDs (Colloquial Series) (Paperback)
I went traveling in Thailand and wanted to prepare by learning a little Thai. This book was ok, but could have been much more useful if: 1) The dialogue excercises and examples had been more geared towards typical traveler conversation. Instead, the first dialogues present "in the office" conversations. 2) The roman letter pronunciation system followed a more standardized model. I found the system that this book uses to be far different from other pronunciation systems, and hence very confusing. On the good side, the flow of the book and the CD match up pretty well, and the book has lessons in Thai script, though I wished that it showed the differnt fonts, or all the different ways of writing the same Thai letter. In Thailand, I was not able to recognize many letters that I thought I had learned, because they did not match the examples in the book.
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