Customer Reviews

Thai: An Essential Grammar (Essential Grammars)

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I recently picked up this book in Bangkok and found I could put it to immediate use. Such an example would be the use of serial verbs where in English we would need a number of conjunctions. This enabled me to break out of stilted, one sentence at a time, conversation with my Thai friends.

This is not a dry academic treatise but a ready-to-use guide that is clearly explained in lay terms.

The author also wrote the Teach Yourself Thai book which I found very helpful when first visiting Thailand.

I strongly recommend this book, particularly for those people like myself wanting to "break out" of beginner's Thai. It is an invaluable reference that will need to be supplemented with a text book and good tape set, if you do not already have those.

First of all let me stress that I have this book in hardcopy as well - and I absolutely love it!

This was also the reason that I picked this eBook as one of the first I purchased for my new Kindle 2. I did not check the preview before purchasing... that was a big mistake.

The eBook edition is just not done right. All Thai letters are included as bitmap images. (If you look carefully in the "Product Detail" above, you will see it weights in with a whopping 20070 KB)

Although it must have taken forever to do this way, it just does not work for the reader. The quality of the graphic characters is really terrible and besides it makes this otherwise slender book take a HUGE chunk of your Kindle memory.

Am I missing something here? I thought the Kindle would be able to display Unicode characters...

Can I return an eBook?

Living in Thailand, I've found that speaking Thai is invaluable, even though many here can speak some degree of English. Since the logic behind Thai is so different than English, a good grammar book is a must if one wishes to seriously learn the language. This is by far the best grammar companion I have found.

My only gripes are with the transliteration. There are some inconsistancies romanizing the Thai letter "Ro Reua (ร)", in some examples, they use an "r", and others, they use an "l", which could be confusing to some readers.

Another gripe about the romanization is how they use "c" for "Jor Jan", which is a j/ch sound, and a funny "n" with a hook for the "ng" sound. Since a "c" never makes a "j" sound in English, and the "n with a hook" doesn't exist, it took me a while to get used to seeing them. I suppose that it's better to ignore the romanization all together and focus on the actual Thai alphabet, which is more important, which is what I did.

Those gripes aside, I would recommend this title to anyone who wants to give learning Thai a serious go.

I just came back from a stay in Thailand, where this book was an invaluable companion. The best parts of the book are the breadth of content, good layout and the very clear reading/writing section. After reading and practicing with this book, communicating with Thai people was much easier. I'd recommend using this with the Pimsleur program to improve pronunciation and confidence :)

This is more than just a grammar book. In addition to providing understanding of how to string Thai words into meaningful sentences, I get such a fine flavor of Thai culture as it is woven into the selected word/phrase usage etc. An essential guide for anyone who wants to advance beyond typical tourist phrase book Thai. I combined this book with a good Thai-English dictionary and a good English-Thai dictionary, and I now have what I need to effectively write and converse in Thai. This has been a godsend for me as a do-it-yourself Thai language learner. Bravo to David Smith. The only thing I'd change in the book is that I'd feature Thai script before the transliteration. That would help with the reading since I wouldn't first see the transliterations. But hey, it's a great book anyway.

This book is a comprehensive guide to how sentences are formed in Thai. Perhaps it is not suitable for beginners, but after mastering the basics you will appreciate being able to go to a book like this to get help with understanding the structure of sentences you come across. For example, continuous tenses with 'yuu', constructions with 'hai', the use of 'wai' - it is all good stuff. I love it.

If I were forced to choose between this book and "Thai Reference Grammar" (Higbie and Thinsan), well: I wouldn't choose. They are both very well-written and well-thought-out books written by people with vast experience.

For example, David Smyth was involved in the Linguaphone Thai Course, and then later wrote "Teach Yourself Thai." He is immensely qualified to write the present book, which explains, among other things, why the word "talaat" (= "market") has the second syllable pronounced with the LOW tone and not the FALLING tone!

But I must have one petty criticism! (Mustn't I? :-) )

This book does not explain how to look up words in a Thai dictionary, not COMPLETELY. The question is: which comes first in a Thai dictionary, PIAK ( = wet) or PRIAP (= compare)?? This book gets it all wrong. The right answer appears in, of all places, "Fundamentals of the Thai Language," that totally ancient book which nevertheless sits in the bookshelves of many farang living in Thailand.

The answer is right there! Look in the back! :-)

My friends have recommended other Thai grammar books but I have to say this has been the best one yet! It isn't a book for those who are just starting the language, but it is an excellent text to have when you have some background in the language and are just confused to why Thai speakers use words or sentence patterns a certain way. It uses the AUA phonetic alphabet that is also used in the AUA language books and the Hoomchamlong's Thai language textbook

I have the hard copy of this in my library and it is a truly valuable work. That said, the e-book has been poorly done. Not only are the words written in the Thai alphabet so small they can barely be read, but many of the transliterated words are incorrect. Many of the transliterated words ending in "ng" are missing the final "g". This results in the Thai verb "song" (to send) becoming "son" and the verb "long" (to descend) becoming "lon". You guys really need to fix this. These mistakes in converting the hardcopy to e-book format are giving a great book a bad reputation (and confusing Thai language students in the process).