Learning Thai in a attempt to put my language learning in perspective (and because it is fun). Learning Thai from home in UK for now mostly via the Internet. For some insight into why I blog in general read this.
I have met a number of people, who claim that they wish to learn this language or that language, but they are waiting for a course. "I hear they are going to start a Mandarin course in September so I am waiting for that to start" for example. Why wait? We know that plenty of people around the world learn second or third languages without a course, and with the Internet you can find your own content so why wait? The typical answer would be something along the lines of "I don't want to do anything wrong", what can this mean? are they afraid that they are going to "break" Italian somehow, render is unusable to anybody. At the very least what harm could just listening to language do? Apparently some people are of the opinion that even this is risky without trained supervision. To be fair some languages can be a little tough, an innocent bystander just listening to an argument in Afrikaans could come away with bruises and minor flesh wounds.
Do I need a class?
I have attended one class in Mandarin (just the one evening) and in the pursuit of further knowledge I recently listened to a bunch of recorded lessons from one of the Confucius Institutes, I also remember studying how not to speak languages at school and an Italian course that was provided for me by my Employers many, many, many years ago. The most striking thing is that you spend a lot of time listening to other students being stupid or waiting for other students to catch up because they are being stupid. To be fair they have to wait when I am being stupid but the cumulative effect of all the stupidity is a huge waste of time. You need an excellent teacher and/or an excellent curriculum to even start counteracting the stupidity and if god forbid the teacher is a little stupid then everybody is DOOMED.
My next problem is the content, I want to choose it. I remember doing the Italian course having to learn a bunch of stuff about airports and meeting people from planes. I had no interest or use but had to learn it because the teacher rated our progress. I dropped out of the course.
So do I need a teacher?
That depends on how you define teacher, I have listened to lots of material on Youtube for example, every single one of those people was a teacher of sorts, every Thai person I may meet and talk with is potentially a teacher, everybody I may meet on Skype at sometime could be a teacher. A confidante, a trusted friend can be a powerful teacher. Recently I have had a Chinese teacher with whom I can pick a topic and talk to for an hour, that is a valuable experience. In the classic sense, in the classroom sense however I do not see the need for a teacher.
There is some discussion over when you should first start to speak a foreign language. I am siding with the "when you feel ready" camp at the moment, I certainly don't feel that people should be forced to speak in classes etc. The flip side of course is that until you do speak and indeed use the language for communication then you haven't actually achieved speaking a language, you are standing on the edge of the precipice shuffling your feet and checking the knot on the bungee rope for the umpteenth time but you have not jumped. Just my opinion but I would even go so far as to say that written communication doesn't count, language starts with sound in my world. I would agree with Benny who strongly feels that a fear of speaking holds back a lot of language learners but I think this fear is just one of two great fears (more on the other one later). And I do feel that the solution is not necessarily to make people force themselves to speak.
I didn't attempt to speak to anyone for a little over three months when learning Chinese (and that was too early), and would probably do the same for Thai except that I wanted to experiment (more on my first Thai words at some point). Actually I find that I don't actually practice out aloud much at all, I like to get the sounds in my head first, even to the extent that when I tried some Pimsleur in Chinese I would just say the responses in my head I didn't feel like opening my mouth at all.
You can read more about some misconception and the ALG approach at the AUA Thai blog in a post entitled Forbidden to Speak! – (and comments about Steve and Benny). Interestingly I think that there is a suggestion that you are not even supposed to think about the language (impossible in my case or though I could certainly analyse it less than I have had to, to write these blog posts). In practicing to speak out aloud a little, I noticed one very significant fact though. Prior to attempting to practice the pronunciation of the few words that I knew in my head the words that I considered I knew were the sounds of the Thai speakers I heard. Focusing on speaking the words were replaced with my interpretation. Not good at all, this is only my experience but could this be what causes many to fall short of native sounding language if they speak too early?
If it is the case that the problem is simply one of replacing good sounds with imperfect then all I need to do is switch them back again, perhaps not a trivial task but more listening seems to fix it, and if this is the problem awareness is my best defense.
The second week learning Thai included much of the same activities, I had a bit less time than the first week unfortunately, work started to bite into time ridiculously and I can't help continuing the Chinese ;). Lots more listening and watching both real Thai and various lessons etc. and as usual much of it fitting into otherwise dead time. During the second week I have started looking for things I am going to need later on in my studies, including blogs written by Thai learnings. For example Bakunin learns Thai. It was from Bakunin's blog I learned about the videos at fukduk.tv I think I will like the videos on channel 12, I have watched the one embedded above twice now (haven't go a clue what she is saying apart from the obvious visual cues), I suspect this aspect of my learning is still going to confuse many people.
Week 2 also included the second contact, a tiny tiny attempt to speak Thai to a Thai. Will write up a post on these soon promise. This is almost certainly the last speaking experiment for a while particularly as I think I now know why ALG approach recommends not speaking language you are learing in the early stages (another post on the way).
Observations
More stuff I shouldn't be doing (thinking too much about the process) regarding Thai language it no longer sounds like anything else, just Thai (this is very encouraging). In the video embedded above, as in many other sources now I can pick out a few words, not enough to be useful. Early on she says a number, five hundred and fifty three, the first time I watched it I heard fifty three, but then I found out a meaning for that roi sound I like so now I hear five hundred and fifty three. Of course she may be saying a bigger number I have not got that far yet, in fact I have not actually deliberately sat down to learn Thai numbers in any systematic way at all.
I am going to stop logging times in posts and record them in the sidebar of this blog, time to get a little more organized. The timings for the first week are copied below.
Listening: 8.5h
Background listen: 10.0h
Video: 3h
Lessons: 6h
Conversation: 15s
That is a shock, it means in the first week I spent over 25hrs learning Thai, how is that possible? I was shocked at first but thinking on it the background listening is easy to rack up hours, can listen to Thai whilst working (not in meetings of course), listen to Thai whilst writing these blog posts, whilst shopping etc. etc. Attentive listening is a little more focused but can be done whilst driving, walking, about to drop off to sleep and I was aided heavily in the first week by the fact that my family put up with Thai in the car whilst I was driving them places. Video, well I watched a film that accounts for some, technically some of my video gets logged to one or other form of listening, because there is a lot of content on Youtube and I may be playing that in the background whilst doing something else on the computer. Don't feel sorry for me I put a lot more EFFORT into writing blog posts than learning Thai.
Edit: 16/06/2010 I have added a book category to my timings, that will cover reading books about Thai etc. Eventually I guess I will need to add a further for actually reading Thai books etc.
Edit 01/06/2010: I hated trying to do timings, I don't think I even did a very goods job a few of the figures don't quite add up. In theory it should be simple, I am a computer programmer after all, however I like to be random and spontaneous. I think my timings are near enough to still be useful for the first eight weeks but am stopping any effort to maintain them. Going forward I may put forward some finger in the air estimates.
Great action and stunts, the girl lead character has an annoying voice, though.
The Films
The first week I rewarded myself with a Thai film, Ong Bak the Beginning, a Tony Jaar movie.
The next week my wife was going out with some friends on Thursday evening leaving me to my own devices, my sons are big enough and ugly enough to look after themselves or in the case of the older two go out and come back past my bedtime ;) so I picked up two more Tony Jarr movies on special offer for £5. The movies were the original Ong Bak and Warrior King, note I could have picked them up even cheaper on Amazon.
I watched Ong Bak the Beginning twice the first time on my own the second time with my eldest son, he is into martial arts, street acrobatics and free running so loved the film and we could talk about the stunts etc. I am getting fit again with his help and can teach him a few martial art tricks. Now I am happy in this case to run the English subs, pure input exponents won't like this but I will address this in a later post, I was paying attention to the Thai language a lot, obviously I could not understand hardly anything but am getting used to the flow and sounds, a few tiny bits I could understand for example "I understand" he says, "good" the master replies.
That Thursday was fun I enjoyed both the other films, probably better material because they are in a contemporary setting, Warrior King has a couple of long sequences of Mandarin Chinese which was annoying, a slap in the face (look how much Chinese you can understand, it is going to switch back to to Thai in a minute and you will understand next to NOTHING) get thee behind me Satan, I dispelled the voices and returned to focusing on meaningless babble.
The Point
I will watch the other two films again soon and then watch them all again in a few weeks, my input methodology will shock some with the amount of hours effort that I seem to be putting in but for example these three films x 2 = about 9 hours attentive listening. No work no effort, I enjoyed them all and would have enjoyed them even if not learning Thai (my son had watched a few clips of Tony Jaa shared with his free running friends anyway and has been pestering me for a while to watch the movies). A lot of my other listening is in otherwise dead time.
This post covers two aspects of my learning, one is using memory and mental techniques in an effort not to forget, the other is more observation on what I get from listening to lots of Thai. With Chinese I knew that listening to lots of real Chinese helped immensely but could not easily explain how. Now I am pulling out observations as I go along, this will not be everything by any means but hopefully enough to illustrate.
Remembering with stories and pictures
In Benny's post Imagination your key to Memorizing hundreds of words quickly Benny describes how he uses mental imagery to remember words, I agree it is a very powerful memory technique, and as Benny points out has been used by many people to remember lots of different things. Unlike Benny apparently I do not find it useful to remember long lists of words, the more words I try to pull out of memory this way the more awkward it becomes. I use it to patch those weird sticking points, the words that you want to learn that inexplicably refuse to stick.
In this case the word was Kaojai to understand (still don't know how to write or romanise :)), I imagine a cow with a big eye, it is bright sunlight and the month of May. The eye gives me the sound for jai (I never forgot this bit started with a j just forgot the sound afterwards). Why the month of May, well I am lazy, I was also forgetting the sound of the question particle for a question at the end of a sentence (I think because I have encountered a bunch of different particles before that muddied the memory of the sound). How do I magine the month of May? in a picture with no calendar and why don't you need to animate your pictures like Benny does? Don't know its my brain I will use it how I like, I guess you just have to adapt this kind of thing to your own brain. So my cow helps me remember the sound of Koon kowjai may? Do you understand?
But shouldn't that be mai? not may? Futz how did that happen? Quick fix give the cow a shopping basket, she is about to mai dongxi (buy things in Chinese). At the same time this (mistake?) joins an informal list of things in my head to listen out for.
Better than this though there are more significant mind techniques, I have experimented with visualisation many times in the past, it can be highly effective, I will be posting about this more at some point, the technique I experimented with about 30 years ago is almost exactly the same I the one described in the post I linked to. I am relearning it right now, because I had more focus on vison than sound, but have used it to some extent in learning Chinese to good effect. The well extablished Mnemonic techniques are effective but I see them as temporary patches to be applied if you have to, not a main technique, visualistion takes longer to learn for sure but like many things you get back it often proportional to the time you put into it.
The range of language
A difficult part of listening comprehension is finding the range of acceptable pronunciation of various sounds in the language. I gained a huge boost in Chinese by learning most of the range right of the bat, it helps you talk to real people it helps you notice the sounds that you actually need to notice to speak the language etc. etc. For example the word arai (what : I think) can be pronounced with a simple r, with a rolled r or with an r that sounds more like an l (or at least that is the way it seems to me).
So back to the cow problem listening to lots of different Thai stuff on Youtube some genuine Thai some lessons I note in the following what seems to be two different ways to pronounce that mai may, listen to how the girl says it. Now maybe is is just my untrained ears, maybe some girlies say it this way, maybe Thais from some areas (I don't know yet but I will eventually as my mental map of the sounds of Thai expands). The May version seems less common but explains why my original cow did not have a shopping basket. Actually going forward I may even discover the is no may sound just a slightly different version of mai and my foreign ears initially hear this as may because of the sound combinations I am used to, it doesn't matter, all sorts of similar trips are resolving slowly as I listen.... In a bitter twist of fate whilst listening to a bunch of Youtube stuff as I write this someone just tells me that Thai has no 'a' sound as in the English word may. I am sure I have heard a stronger "may" sound than the one in this video so my current belief is that some Thais have a "may" sound. This happened a lot with Mandarin, "no they never say it that way, NO they NEVER say it that way, oH well yes of course speakers from Taiwan say it that way".
Notes
03/05/2010: I have only bothered with this technique once so far, I seem to be acquiring words at a fast enough rate and with no pressing need to learn specific words, I am quite happy with that, particularly as it doesn't require much effort.
25/05/2010: Re-reading this I should also point out that I have encountered the mai -> may transformation regularly now particularly when people are speaking faster. Sometimes to the extent that someone will switch, it seems more prevalent in the mai that is used for "not" so say man mai dee na krap! (it not good) fast and casual and it may come out as man may dee n-hup.
Like most things it is just the way that Thai is used and the range of acceptable sounds.
Blogging like this is hard, it takes time and I am sure that the observation changes the process, probably in an adverse way. Having said that it is a lot easier to observe what and why I am learning as I apply what I learned about languages in Chinese to a new language.
The observation of others in this initial eight week period would change things even more, which is why this blog is closed to the outside world for now.
I have to speed type and brain dump from my notes and memories, apologies for spelling/grammar issues as ever.
Brain overload
I managed to trigger a brain overload event at the end of the first week, learning Thai, Mandarin and learning a lot of new tech stuff to apply at work resulted in a very heavy sleep on Friday night with a groggy Saturday and a head full of vivid dreams from the night before (I put this down to a lot of re-wiring of neurons and laying down memories).
On Thursday evening I had over an hours conversation in Mandarin that went very well, but bizarrely blanked a couple of simple words, by Friday I was even blanking a couple of English words. Fortunately by Sunday my mind was much fresher.
First contact
Thursday I spoke my first Thai to a Thai, both highly significant and an anti-climax, more on this in a later post I will lump this together with sound recordings with my second contact (occurred the following week).
Reward
On the first Saturday I rewarded my-self with my first Thai film, more on this and two more films in a later post. The first steps towards effortless learning.
Time on job
Mostly listening and finding a bunch more lessons on Youtube and the like. Very happy to find some Thai with the Mandarin subs, I think this series (see below) will feature a lot in my study in the following weeks, it is also available with English subs. but I can use it to practice Mandarin reading at the same time. One way to maintain my Mandarin effort whilst learning Thai.
During the last few days of this period, approximately 2.5 hours attentive listening to real Thai, 3 hours listening to various lessons, 3 hours non-attentive listening and 3 hours video (with either English or Chinese subs), 15s conversation.
Observations
Going to put more observations in a post to follow regarding a cow and a shopping basket (bet that got your attention).
Having picked up ti ni, have now got ti nai (where). Not sure how exclusive these sounds are but they seem to be fairly at least.
One meaning for that roi sound I heard and liked is a hundred (wonder if there are more).
More attuned to ka and krab/b particularly paying attention to where they are not used (obviously Thai people don't ram them on the end of every sentance) also interested to see ka use for yes as in "yes I am coming" (Chinese laile).
