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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very useful, but many mistakes, March 4, 2010
This review is from: Outrageous Thai: Slang, Curses and Epithets (Paperback)
The first and only book of its kind for Thai slang. Thai teachers only want you to learn perfect correct polite Thai, but considering few actually speak that way, you'll be left confused in any conversation. This book will get you started to everyday language.
That said, the number of spelling mistakes (in English, in Thai, and in karaoke) is just horrendous. One out of almost every six Thai examples has a spelling mistake.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
5-Star Content But Poor Print Quality, January 27, 2010
This review is from: Outrageous Thai: Slang, Curses and Epithets (Paperback)
The content of this book is excellent and unique. I don't understand the criticisms that the book teaches slang and dirty words - I think the subtitle "Slang, Curses and Epithets" gives a clear enough warning of what's inside, and any reader can decide if this topic is valuable to them. It is probably most suitable for advanced learners, and covers material that you can't find anywhere else. Actually the first chapter "Slang Basics" is not particularly dirty at all, and explains some very common ways of speaking that you will hear all the time but never learn about in school or other books. This was my favorite chapter - it shows what pronouns people really use and explains some really common abbreviations (e.g. people always say "gin khao yang?" but many other sources will only teach the longer formal form.) This is really helpful and saves a lot of wondering if you're reading/hearing it right. It also gives Thai equivalents to common English phrases like "it's like", "I'm gonna," "I don't get why", etc. There is an especially outstanding treatment of several of the many ending particles - "sa","la","wa",etc. It is actually the best explanation I've seen of these particles.
The next chapters are divided by subject, focusing on topics like how to greet people, how to talk about people's physical appearance, how to describe their personalities, and, of course, how to use curses and epithets. Because it's specific to those topics, I didn't find it as helpful as the more general first chapter, but I've dipped into it to use as a phrasebook or figure out the Thai I'm hearing around me. It also includes quite a lot of entries with the author's understanding of Thai society. He talks about racial discrimination in Thailand, attitudes towards drinking, Thai dating conventions, and so on, along with the associated words to talk about it.
With that said, I deducted a star for the printing that detracts so much from the book. First, I don't know if this is just an intentionally "cool" font to match the edgy nature of the book, but the Thai font is non-standard and is missing a line on some of the vowels, making it a bit hard to read. The Thai tone marks are also floating strangely far away from the rest of the letters. Second, in an effort to help learners, they put a space between each Thai word. This again makes the book hard to read, because the Thai language usually puts a space between sentences where we would put a period or comma. There are lots of entries that would naturally divide up into 2 or 3 sentences in Thai, but in this book they're missing their natural punctuation (a space) because ALL the words have spaces between them. Finally, the book is filled with careless errors - there were maybe a dozen cases where the Thai romanization actually spelled out something different and incorrect from the Thai above it. All of these made an otherwise-excellent book a lot less enjoyable to read than it could have been. Hopefully there will be a revised edition.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Cute, but will probably be useless for most, September 11, 2010
This review is from: Outrageous Thai: Slang, Curses and Epithets (Paperback)
This is an interesting read if you're learning Thai, because you do get some flavorful language that most language books don't touch. What the author doesn't make clear is where he learned this stuff and with what groups of Thais. I'm assuming he's an expat living in Bangkok who interacts primarily with a certain group of Thais, who if you've been there you may be familiar with.
Unfortunately this doesn't really represent the rest of Thai society, and most of the slang in here is really, really specific to those groups. I couldn't figure out how to get something across to a Thai friend, and this book had something similar to what I was trying to say. They had no idea what the Thai phrase presented in the book meant, and neither did another Thai person I asked. They browsed through the book a bit and recognized some of the common stuff (the basic curse words and so on) but almost none of the rest. This was in Chiang Mai, and my girlfriend and other friends who looked at the book are from all over the northwestern region.
So if you're a budding Muay Thai boxer and want to learn some colorful language to use in the rough Bangkok Muay Thai scene (and it would probably work in other southern areas), I'm guessing this book might help you. For most, it won't.
The worst part is that there's a section with "romantic" stuff, and there are some useful words and phrases included (not bargirl stuff, there are entire books for that if that's what you're interested in) but even most of those are obscure slang. Kind of pointless trying to say romantic phrases that come out as gibberish to most Thais.
The thing that sort of saved it for me is the discussion of culture that goes along with each section. The author tries to get across Thai social norms, and how slang fits in. Even if the phrases included don't mean anything to the Thai people you meet, it's still useful to know how slang fits into the language and the culture, and that's not something that many other books cover.
I looked through a few similar books (including the books meant for bargirl interactions) in a bookstore in Thailand and I think this was probably the best one, so if you're really looking for something like this it's a decent option. Might be a better idea to get two or three of them, you might get a little more balance that way.
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