Customer Reviews

A.U.A. Language Center Thai Course, Book 1

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is the first in a 6 book set that starts from very basic Thai right through to upper intermmediate/experienced. The major reasons that make this set of books the best I've seen and used are as follows: 1, very well structured logical progression. 2, Use of IPA phonetics 3, Use of Thai script from page one 4, Use of useful language (you can actually use it!) 5, Use of colloquial Thai (book 4 'Small Talk') 6, Use of many styles of hand written Thai and not only typed script. (very useful!)

If you are looking for a book on Thai language this is definitely the book I would recommend. When I picked up this book I knewonly a couple of words in Thai, now I am quite fluent.

I studied this couse while in Thailand and can attest to it's effectiveness. As there is only one other review I thought a second might be helpful to an aspiring Thai learner. This course is for serious students though. Expect to spend about 100 hours+ per book and cassette pack. By the way... you must study with the tapes. It starts out with subject matter a little less useful than a guidebook because it presupposes that you are in it for the long haul and will pay your dues in order to REALLY learn Thai! But like I said "you need the tapes!" so here are the addresses if you can't find them on the net:U.S.+CANADA SEAP Publications, East Hill Plaza, Ithaaca, NY 14850 AUSTRALIA+NEW ZEALAND MIP Publications P.O. Box 416 Chatswood N.S.W. 2057 AUSTRALIA and from all other places THAI STUDIES DEPT> AUA Language Center 179 Rajadamri rd Bangkok 10330 Thailand

I've been learning Thai on and off for a while now. When I was in Chiang Mai, I took courses at the AUA there (they were very good), and they roughly followed these books for the classes. From looking around both here and in Thailand, they are really the ONLY comprehensive set of books that teaches english speakers how to speak thai. I also believe that the few college courses in america that teach thai also use these books.

The books were published a long time ago, but they still work fine. We had a laugh in book 2 during one of the exercises where they were arguing between 8 baht and 9 baht for a taxi ride (a.k.a. 18 cents or 20 cents nowadays)

I started with book 2 because I was already partially conversational. The books include vocabular, tone exercises, dialog practices, reading for comprehension, and how to read and write the thai characters. Each book contains perhaps 20 lessons. The lessons are not especially subject oriented (i.e. chapter 8 foods), but rather they are more a progression of words and sentance structures that are used most frequently.

Anyways, buy them, go to thailand and take the classes, have fun.

I started learning thai with the AUA series and have gone through the three books. All build on each other in an orderly fashion, you really have the choice of just focusing on speaking or you can incorporate the reading/writing too. The only negative is that the vocabulary is often times not as useful. "A cow is smaller than a water buffalo" I combined this series with the Colliquial Thai course and the combo addressed each others weaknesses.

This is a great course. It is as good as "Pimsleur's Thai" but A.U.A. has more substance. This fairly short course teaches basic Thai. But instead of just giving you the vocabulary (like many other courses I have tried), it gives you a lot of practice exercises and drills. Because the chapters are so short, a smart person can master one chapter everyday. For the average person, it might take 2 to 4 days to master a chapter. Though reading and writing Thai is taught, the emphasis of this course is on speaking and understanding spoken Thai.
Which leads me to the major draw back of this "BOOK." If you don't have the Cd's that go with this book, than it is probably not worth using. Without the Cd's or tapes to listen to, it will be extremely hard to learn Thai using this course. What is worse, (as far as I know) Amazon does not sell them.
You can buy the course with Cd's form Cornell University at http://www.lrc.cornell.edu/sales/catalog/thai. But it is very expensive.
If you can afford the whole package, this will be a 5 star course. If not... Then, forget about it. Don't waste your money by buying just the book.

I have been trying to learn Thai for the past 17 years, so that I can speak to my mother and sister in Thai better. I have found that there is no perfect book that can teach you everything. But this book, is definitely one of the better ones that I had found. Before embarking on my first trip to Thailand, I met an ex-GI through the internet who mailed me his own copy of this lesson book. It was essential in teaching me basics before I arrived on Thailand soil. This book uses phonetic readings consistently for teaching you pronunciation, and even gets into the many tones of Thai. This book did the best of teaching me the tones.

I am Thai and trying to teach my friend Thai language. I think the book is hard to understand and not intuitively study. Now I use material from other books and materials which are much easier for me to teach and for my friend to understand.