Thai - How difficult?

[1FinickyOne 6,962]

I have heard that Thai is the 5th most difficult language to learn... any other opinions?

 

How does it compare to Vietnamese? 

[Crossy 27,089]

My biggest issue is actually hearing the tones, I'm deaf in one ear and pretty crumby in the other (I'll spash out for an aid one day). Of course when speaking I invariably get the tones wrong and (like Cantonese) it's always rude!

 

I've not tried Viet but at least they use something akin to the western character set when writing.

 

I managed quite well with Korean 20 odd years back, but it's not tonal and, despite using a unique character set, the rules are quite simple along with a lot of loan words.

 

Having a long-haired dictionary is useful in any language of course

 

[cheshiremusicman 291]

8 minutes ago, Crossy said:

My biggest issue is actually hearing the tones, I'm deaf in one ear and pretty crumby in the other (I'll spash out for an aid one day). Of course when speaking I invariably get the tones wrong and (like Cantonese) it's always rude!

 

I've not tried Viet but at least they use something akin to the western character set when writing.

 

I managed quite well with Korean 20 odd years back, but it's not tonal and, despite using a unique character set, the rules are quite simple along with a lot of loan words.

 

Having a long-haired dictionary is useful in any language of course

 

I have had exactly the same problem, I just cannot get the 'tones'. I've always been told that I'm a good mimic when it comes to languages, but for the hell of me I cannot speak Thai correctly even after trying for some 14 years - I must just be thick!

Years ago, I was learning French and I was told that I had a accent that was from the south of France - Marseille I think, but I've now forgotten nearly all the French I learned. The other language I had the utmost difficulty with was Swedish. I think with some languages you have to train your vocal chords from a very early age to get the hang of them. I'm definitely not tone deaf as I cannot stand out of tune music or singing - drives me mad and my hearing is still OK at 77 albeit one ear is better than the other. I think that I will buy one of these 'Auto Speech Translators' - thank goodness for modern electronics!
 

[Aforek 1,229]

For me, the only difficult thing are the tones, yes ... for the rest, grammar, writing, reading, it's just some work to do , not very complicate  ... every language has one's difficulties ... I am French, and for me, German is very difficult, grammar is huge, English not so much , it's a luck that English is the common language for mankind 

but Thai, the 5 th most difficult language in the world, I don't believe it !

try Finnish, Arabic, Chinese , Basque and others that I don't know ...

Edited October 21, 2020 by Aforek

[CygnusX1 408]

Of the two foreign languages I’ve studied extensively, French and Thai, I’d say that for me at least, Thai’s around 20 times harder than French - ie for every hour of study to improve my French, 20 hours is required to improve my Thai by the same amount. That’s despite the fact that I’ve had many hours of private tuition in Thai, but am entirely self taught in French.

 

The main difficulty for me is not tones but grammar - despite those notorious irregular verbs, French grammar is almost identical to English grammar when compared to Thai. French and English also share so many words. I can read a page from a children’s book in French about 30 times faster than the same text in a Thai translation. The French words mostly fly past without my even needing to consciously translate them, whereas I have to decode the Thai grammar in a way that’s a bit like solving a succession of cryptic crossword clues. Thai’s different alphabet and lack of spaces between words probably don’t help either.

 

[1FinickyOne 6,962]

1 hour ago, CygnusX1 said:

in a way that’s a bit like solving a succession of cryptic crossword clues.

Yes. I find this too - I can know every word in the sentence and not know what the sentence means... though I guess English can be idiomatic like that too... 

[zyphodb 2,796]

Unless you have an ear for tones virtually impossible beyond simple question and answer I'd say, that's after several years of pretty well total immersion, of course it doesn't help each region speaking their own version, Thais from different regions often seem to have trouble understanding each other so how can we?

[Oxx 3,465]

20 hours ago, kenk24 said:

I have heard that Thai is the 5th most difficult language to learn... any other opinions?

 

My opinion: that's a stupid assertion.  (1) the difficulty of a language will depend upon how different it is from languages you already know.  (2) There are roughly 6,500 languages in the world, many of them far more difficult than Thai.  For a native English speaker there are even common languages more difficult to learn than Thai such as Finnish, Mandarin, Arabic, Hungarian, Basque, Navajo, Icelandic.

[mr mr 5,517]

14 minutes ago, Oxx said:

 

My opinion: that's a stupid assertion.

stupid is as stupid does. 

[Colabamumbai 3,644]

Go to a Thai Language School. Speak Thai everywhere you go, they will correct you. Start learning the basics on You Tube. Have a Thai mindset. 

[1FinickyOne 6,962]

21 minutes ago, Oxx said:

My opinion: that's a stupid assertion.

Thank you..

 

otherwise your answer was interesting. I was just noting what I had heard... 

[donnacha 5,402]

55 minutes ago, Oxx said:

For a native English speaker there are even common languages more difficult to learn than Thai such as Finnish, Mandarin, Arabic, Hungarian, Basque, Navajo, Icelandic.

Actually, I found it surprisingly easy to attain fluency in all those languages. Especially Navajo, that one was p*ss-easy.

 

Edited October 22, 2020 by donnacha

[uptome1946 11]

 

 

My opinion after 30 years of Thai study.

 

To learn Thai presents many challenges to a speaker of a Western language beyond simply hearing and making the correct tones.   The five "tones"  by the way are different in pitch and in amplitude.  For example, rising tones start out quiet and get louder.  Words with falling tones start out loud.  So it is not just pitch or frequency it is also sound intensity that changes.

 

Syntactically, Thai is a "topic comment" language which means that the first word in the sentence is the most important word or idea.  Thai sentences do not follow the subject predicate structure of Indo-European languages.  One word can be a sentence in Thai since subjects if they are recoverable by context are omitted.

 

IMHO it is absolutely necessary to learn the alphabet to learn the language since the English approximations are far from the actual phonemes of Thai.

 

The old saying, "to have another language is to have another life" is especially true for a language like Thai.

 

Here is a gloss of a sentence I just heard an hour ago.

 

"He do same not hear I speak".

 

Meaning "he is acting as if he didn't hear what I just said"

[charliebadenhop 139]

Yes, the tones will be a problem for most non-Thai people. Although my tones are lousy, the more Thai I learn, the more I am understood, so I don't really worry about it.

 

There is an excellent FREE learning platform for Thai. www.lingopolo.org

 

I have been studying one hour a day for the last two years, and I am supposedly half way to full fluency... not considering the tones. 

 

 

[andre47 1,186]

19 hours ago, Aforek said:

For me, the only difficult thing are the tones, yes ... for the rest, grammar, writing, reading, it's just some work to do , not very complicate  ...

Writing is not complicated for you? How can you learn to write Thai? Even many Thais cannot write correct...555.

Reading and talking is doable, but I don't believe that I will be able to write Thai one day. The problem is that if you hear a syllable you cannot be sure how to write it. There are 3-5 different possibilities. You have to learn and remember the correct writing of each single word. Nowadays we can use software at our phone or our computer. That makes it a bit easier.  

The tones are also not easy, but in most situations you or your counterpart can catch the meaning from the context.