Customer Reviews

Easy Thai: An Introduction to the Thai Language

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The beauty of the Thai alphabet has always fascinated me and I purchased this book back in grad school, only because it was the only one I could find that teaches the alphabet. "Easy Thai" was such an incredible disappointment that I never got very far with it. I finally learned the Thai alphabet a few years later, thanks to 2 excellent books written (in Japanese) for Japanese learners. While teaching debate at a university in Japan, I conducted an intensive self-study of Thai for 3 months before taking a trip to Thailand, and completed both books before arriving in Bangkok. It is a pity that these same books are not available to English speakers as well. I have a Master's degree in Teaching Foreign Language and have therefore had the opportunity to review a wide variety of textbooks. One difficulty that learners of less-studied languages face is the lack of good textbooks and other materials. This book may unfortunately be your only choice if you're serious about learning the Thai alphabet (and don't happen to speak Japanese), but it's not a pretty picture.

My main complaints are:

(1) The book is rife with useless words (especially for beginners!), useless expressions, awkward sentence structure, poor translations, and outdated and/or inappropriate terms like "Chinaman." SEE BELOW for examples.

(2) The phonetic system for representing Thai sounds is a mess, full of capital letters, explanation points, and unnecessary letters. Believe me - there's a far better way!

(3) shoddy format and layout, poor print quality (Thai letters are hard to read), inadequate/unclear explanations, boring beyond words

Incredibly enough, the author actually acknowledges (in the preface) the problems of useless words and boring exercises: "...some of the words used are admittedly not the most-useful ones. (...) Please forgive us if our exercises seem boring or unnecessarily meaningless. You will no doubt appreciate the fact that we are simply trying to initiate you gradually into the mysteries of the Thai language and that it is difficult to concoct much meaning out of a limited number of words. And let us re-emphasize that the following examples are certainly not "deathless Thai prose"; they are only contrived little thoughts to get you to put to work what you have learned."

The exercises don't "seem" boring or unnecessarily meaningless - they are. And there's absolutely no excuse for it. The author claims that it's difficult to make meaningful sentences out of a limited vocabulary. How about: Where's the bathroom? What's your name? It's too hot. I like this food. How much does this cost? Vocabulary in each chapter is of course limited by the Thai letters introduced up to that point, but there are still plenty of useful words that he could have used instead. Even "See Spot run" would be more useful than many of the expressions found in the book. As a trained language teacher myself, I know for a fact that "initiating students gradually into the mysteries of a language" requires neither the use of such insanely useless words nor expressions reminiscent of an LSD trip. And how comforting to know that these boring, meaningless exercises are not "deathless Thai prose," but simply "contrived little thoughts." The author's apology in the preface can only be seen as pathetic: "I know this book sucks - Sorry."

The following is a representative sample of 27 sentences from the book, which readers are asked to translate as practice. Some are intended to be translated into Thai. Others are to be translated from Thai into English, and the English sentences here were taken from the answer key.

1. There is a method for forgetting the wind.

2. Grandmother smells of the plate.

3. He will return the case; that is, his relatives are well off.

4. Wait! In September I'll go see.

5. At the time they were about to lock him up, you sneezed.

6. People have hairs on their legs.

7. Polish his tongs!

8. Conduct the ceremony for returning the flag.

9. Who belched?

10. Look at grandmother pouring.

11. Look at grandmother's neck.

12. A ghost has come.

13. I ran into the Chinaman's leg.

14. My rice farm has a ghost on it.

15. As soon as I sniffed, I sneezed.

16. There are some Laotians who have burdens.

17. A tiger came (walked here) to see you.

18. The boss returned the ivory.

19. It should have a foreword.

20. The lawyer defeats you.

21. As soon as I win, I will come to expand the work.

22. Did Khun Wicha kick him?

23. A Chinese person sneezed.

24. Come and put down the rubber!

25. Perhaps it will be very soiled.

26. There was a priest who brought Mrs. Nipa to work.

27. The Laotian is confused.

Get the picture? One thing is for certain: the Laotian isn't the only one who's confused!

Just wanted to second the review of this book by Pat Hopper. I went through this book in a week or two and couldn't have gotten a better start to reading thai. The best thing about the book is that it starts with the Low Consonants, then the Middle, and then introduces the Common High Class Consonants concurrently with the concept of tone rules. This approach keeps the three classifications of consonants seperate in the students mind as opposed to the student that begins by learning the alphabet in dictionary order.
That said, the book is very sketchy, should use the common "AH! AH EE! EE EU! EU" Thai vowel table, and a clear tone table as in David Smyth's "Teach Yourself Thai."
For me this book was a great introduction, and now that I'm studying a more disciplined course (similar to one Thai children receive in 1st and 2nd grades) I'm learning at faster rate, and filling in the holes and ambiguity that Easy Thai left me with.

The answer to the question in the header definitely is "No, there is no such thing"! So, do not think you will learn much more from this book than sentences like "In Lamphoon there are rice farmers". These sentences are not really the first you would like to know when you plan to visit Thailand. Nevertheless you have to start somewhere, and this book is good as a first acquaintance with the (very complex) Thai language.
I used it before I went to Thailand for the very first time, and it did teach me a bit of the Thai alphabet and some basic things like counting (useful in bargaining). The title will always remain misleading, as I know now (after several years of harsh study) that there definitely is no such thing as "Easy Thai"!
Neverthless recommended to give learning the Thai language a first try.

I love this book. Mr. Allison is charming, cheerful, and an excellent writer, which is something you don't see every day. While I greatly admire Benjawan Becker's books, she, like David Smyth, has the personality of a potted plant. I admit my sentimental bias: Allison's was the first book I ever read on Thai and I practically ate it. It's full of errors and typos and cruddy printing (I used a magnifying glass extensively) because it is printed in Thailand, which to me in my perverse way made it all the more charming. You want to know Thailand? I don't exaggerate too much when I say this book says it all!
This book won't teach you Thai. The title is a joke. But it WILL teach you the script/alphabet. And what other book does that in such a systematic fashion? Believe me: get this book, devour it, and then get Benjawan's beginner book. Avoid everyone else. Smyth is OK, but would be WAY better if he changed his ghastly transliteration (the "r" he puts everywhere, for example, as in "bpairt" for "eight") This makes his book for me unreadable.
A brief word on software. There's Benjawan's beginner book written over to CD-ROM and also Matthew Courage's. For the life of me, I can't see how anyone who wasn't a total genius could get to first base on these programs without having learned the alphabet beforehand.* The Courage audio quality, BTW, is horrendous - sounds like they got the cleaning lady (a sort of Thai female Joe Pesci) to do the talking for 500 baht. The male talkers always sound like they're about to bolt to the john... Mind you, that's often what people are about to do over there.
Finally, I give the book three stars because of the fraudulant title and all the errors and lame sentences (as the earnest but missing-the-point M.A. chap above points out). Plus, I think the ludicrously high ratings that abound in Amazon (this moronic age we live in) make its rating system meaningless. But three stars are good!**
Yours in struggle. Hope to see you over drinks in Bangers!

* Oct 2011: Obviously, Becker's software is to be used with the book, at least for awhile.
** " " : One huge weakness: Allison's brief discussion on tones is ghastly and unnecessarily convoluted. A few days with a tone chart was all I needed.

I learnt to write Thai sat on a beach in four days with this book. Of course it's not that simple after the for days I could not delineate words at all. I had to start reading a children's picture dictionary, then reading books for very young cheldren etc. To write Thai I had to buy children's letter writing books.

But this book does a good job of giving you the basics. The vocab is wierd because to start with you only know a few Thai characters and so there are only a few words they can use.

There are some mistakes in the execises and they have been left in in subsequent editions because the author is Thai. Do all the execises though - they work.

It also ends too soon - just introduces the vowels and tones and then stops. It could have done with some more work on these areas.

This book will teach you to read Thai.

If you want to learn Thai, you can find much much better books than this. The printing quality is very bad, so that the subtleties of Thai letters are totally lost. The vocabulary is weird indeed -- not the sort of words you will use. I suggest getting the Teach Yourself series' Thai book. Better yet, go to Thailand.

Seconds to all comments from the reader from Osaka who writes below.

This book is somewhat misnamed- it doesn't really qualify as an introduction to the Thai language, but just to its writing system. With 44 consonants and 32 vowels there is certainly lots to introduce. This book has many deficiencies- poor quality printing (especially the Thai part), a confusing, substandard system of transcription, nothing that shows how to hand-write Thai letters, and, as other reviewers have noted, the almost unbelievably poorly chosen vocabulary that the authors have used to illustrate Thai spelling. But there is one feature that redeems it a little bit- the book gives the actual order of the letters and exercises in using the Thai dictionary system. Since any learner who wants to read the language will have to learn to use a dictionary, and this is the only work I've seen in English that offers any help in this, it gets a very reluctant three stars. Try out 'Teach Yourself Thai'- for help in handwriting.

The strength of this book is the way it gradually builds on the Thai alphabet. The vocabulary words seem to be chosen not because of their usefulness but because they offer simple examples of how the characters and vowels work.

I used this book 20 years ago when I started learning Thai. It was one of the only books available then, and was printed in the Thailand of 25 years ago, which is why other reviews have complaints about the fonts, etc. Nevertheless, I remember learning to read Thai quickly from the book and thought Allison's sequencing was good.

Without a doubt, easy. One of those you can pick up for 5-10 minutes a day and always feel that you are getting somewhere with this difficult language. Thirty years after picking up this book in a military PX, I'm confident that I couldn't have gotten a better start. Some of the words you get are difficult for a beginner to work into a conversation and it will disappoint anyone who expects to understand casual conversation in Bangkok after finishing just this book, but you will have a serious start on a long journey. He gives you reading from the beginning. Get some tapes from another source or someone to pronounce the vowels for you and you are good to go.