Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53647 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 658 pages

Customer Reviews

An excellent dictionary for learning Thai
Benjawan Poomsan Becker's "Thai-English, English-Thai Dictionary" is clearly meant to be a companion piece to her excellent series of Thai textbooks ("Thai for Beginners", "Thai for Intermediate Learners", and "Thai for Advanced Readers"), and it will obviously be of most use to people who seriously trying to learn Thai. By having Thai in both Phonetic transcript as well as in the Thai alphabet, it means you will be able to use the book both before, and after, you have mastered the thai alphabet. The phonetic transcription system is the same as the one used in her textbooks, (and in other Thai-for-foreigners books published by Paiboon Publishing.)

As the book is aimed at people learning Thai, it does not assume the reader knows anything about the complexities of written Thai, but has a section carefully explaining the basics of the language, so that you can use the dictionary even without having any prior knowledge of Thai. (This section is really an ultra-condensed version of her "Thai for Beginners" textbook.)

Another extremely useful feature is the Thai alphabet guide, which shows examples of the many different font-styles that are used for printing the Thai alphabet. Believe me, even when you have learned to read the Thai alphabet, a different font may completely change the look of the 71 Thai letters, and have you wondering "Is this Thai?". The book is almost worth buying simply for this feature alone!

If you're just planning a trip to Thailand the book may be a bit of an overkill (unless you're linguistically inclined), and you might be better served by something like "Thai - A Rough guide Phrasebook" or something similar. Likewise if you can already read written Thai at a decent speed, this dictionary will probably be a little too light for you. But I would recommend it to anyone in between.

be ware of it's pitfalls
Someone working for the author wrote the other review for this book I would suggest. I am a Thai and English speaker. It is true that this dictionary is highly rated in Thailand. However, this is a poor dictionary and a large number of the translations are simply wrong. You can find misunderstanding and mistranslations on every page. I am sorry to say I am unaware of a better dictionary. Just be aware of its pitfalls

Good but not perfect
I have to agree partially with another review on here in that this book does have it's pit falls - but that said it is by far the best dictionary I have found when learning the language, it has a great selection of vocabulary including combinations of words (sorry the technical term escapes me at the moment) that you will find useful like 'all-out' or 'long-distance'.
It has a section which goes english to thai, then it has a section which is Thai to english, but best of all for all you learners out there it has the phonetic thai (using the english alphabet) to english. The result is that if your talking to someone and can't think of a word you can pull it out and check, if they then say something you don't understand you can look it up in the phonetic section and if they can make you understand you can give them the book and let them find it in the thai to english section.
The only part you have to be careful about is that the words are not always translated exactly - i.e. we may intend to mean one thing but it will be interpreted as another, I did accidently offend a couple people along the way due to this; but ll in all I found this book to be a fantastic resource when I was learning thai, it really did help. I eventually went on to do newspaper translation (thai to english) and radio DJing (in thai) and this book was instrumental in my learning process.