Improving your spoken Thai

About a year or so back my friend the Dude recommended to me that I should invest into a book called THAI REFERENCE GRAMMAR – The Structure of Spoken Thai.

He told me that it was the most useful way he had found to improve his understanding of spoken Thai; both for listening to Thai people speak, and for speaking himself.

I have to say that the idea of buying any book with a title like THAI REFERENCE GRAMMAR sounded about as appealing as having my fingernails and toenails pulled out one by one.

But the Dude kept coming back to me with his suggestion. Every time I’d see him around Thai people I was amazed at how much vocabulary and colloquial Thai the Dude had at his command. Each time I would ask him how he did it. His answer was always the same; he reads Thai as often as he can – cartoon books are a favorite since they are light reading but based on conversational language rather than formal grammar structures, and he always had the THAI REFERENCE GRAMMAR book handy to look up anything he couldn’t figure out.

I’d like to say that I finally broke down and bought a copy, but it isn’t true. The Dude finally gave me one as a present this week. And last night I sat down and started looking through it.

It’s great! I should have bought it a year ago.

It’s organized in an intuitive way with a detailed table of contents at the front of the book, but it also offers two appendices in the back – one for looking up key English words and the other for looking up Thai words via their Romanized spelling.

Each section is clearly labeled with the bit of conversational explanation that it offers. It gives a short explanation of the language usage, then provides the sentence in English, in transliterated (romanized) Thai, and in Thai script.

I should be clear… this is no “book for beginners”. To use it, you should already have a working understanding of Thai language and grammar.

This book is designed to take you from Elementary Thai to an Intermediate level or higher. It is not about explaining tourist phrases, but helping someone like me who has learned textbook Thai to understand the language the way you hear it spoken daily.

Because I have recently studied the Thai writing system I find it especially useful, but even if you can’t read Thai script, the transliteration system is sophisticated enough to allow you to pronounce every word correctly, since it contains marks to identify each of the five tones along with short and long vowels, and a key for pronunciation at the front of the book.

Again, it’s designed for people who are already familiar with the language, so the pronunciation notes are not extensive, but if you know Thai pronunciation already, it is more than adequate to teach you how to read transliterated words in this book.

It’s hard to imagine that I am excited about a grammar reference book, but I am.

This is the book that I have needed for a couple of years – it’s the book that I would have thought couldn’t be written. But it has.

The title is THAI REFERENCE GRAMMAR. It is published by Orchid Press, and the authors are James Higbie and Snea Thinsan.

If you are competent in Thai and you’d like to be a whole lot better, I’d recommend that you spend the 800 or 900 baht needed to get this book.

Here’s a summary from the publisher, Orchid Books:

http://www.orchidbooks.com/indiv_titles.html

Thai Reference Grammar
by James Higbie and Snea Thinsan
2002, 2003, 2004 450 pp., 24.5 x 17.5 cm. Softbound.

ISBN-10: 974-8304-96-5 $39.00
ISBN-13: 978-974-8304-96-0

There are many phrasebooks and course books for beginning-level Thai but until now there has been no book that explains higher-level Thai sentence structure and functional vocabulary. Many students of the Thai language find that basic-level Thai is easy to pick up, but that the language becomes more difficult at higher levels. (For example, there are four ways to say ‘because’ and eleven ways to say ‘only’.) Thai Reference Grammar fills the need for a work that explains high-level Thai sentence structure and vocabulary. The book presents clear explanations of advanced Thai structure, illustrated with examples of typical Thai speech.
The authors, an American and a Thai both with advanced degrees in linguistics and language teaching, analyzed thousands of Thai sentences to formulate clear and concise explanations for all the important sentence patterns of the Thai language. The book is arranged by topic for easy reference. Examples are given in both Thai script and transliterated Thai, written in the English alphabet with no special phonetic symbols. Tones are marked with a special font that shows the level of the sound of each word, essential to pronunciation in tonal languages like Thai.

And here’s a  reader review available from the Orchid Press website:

http://www.orchidbooks.com/book_reviews/thai_ref.html

A new book on the grammar of spoken Thai has been released, and it must be the best book on Thai I’ve seen. Thai Reference Grammar, by James Higbie and Snea Thinsan, is a reference book rather than something you’re likely to polish off in one sitting. The authors analysed examples of spoken and colloquial Thai, then came up with their own examples to illustrate how sentences are built. It comes to more than 400 pages, and must represent thousands of hours of work.
The authors consulted Thai speakers interested in passing on the language, to find out what makes it tick. The transliteration system is good: it gives you the length of vowels as they exist in spoken Thai.
This can be different from their value in written Thai, and in fact the authors change the Thai spelling of some words, given in their examples, to show the way the words are pronounced (kao, for he, has a high tone in spoken Thai but rising tone in written Thai) in cases where this differs from the written version!
The book does not confine itself to spoken Thai, however; for any given word (’so’, for example, in the sense of consequently or therefore) it will give you the six or seven Thai words in use, and show you how they are deployed; and will tell you which are in every-day use and which you’re likely to encounter mainly in writing ie the formal ones you can avoid.
The authors seem to know exactly what trips up or holds back a learner. You’ll find an entire chapter here devoted to the order of events (before, after, in three days time), another to tenses, another one again to the use of ‘gor’, and yet another to end-sentence particles.
This book is a serious and comprehensive study of Thai. I know of none better, and have read plenty. It is accessible, though will take you a while to get through: I spent three hours with it today, and covered less than half a chapter!

Not only is this a pretty cool grammar book, but this book also gives you the essential information to take your “classroom thai” and transform it more into “common speech.” I use this book all the time, and I highly recommend it to any and all intermediate and advance students.
Review by “Chai”

And finally, if you want to buy it online:

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?vci=1330729&kn=Thai+Reference+Grammar